


TAKE THE SOUL, LEAVE THE BODY

by neonheartbeat



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Appalachian Gothic, Blood and Violence, Character Death, Coal Mining, F/M, Gen, Graphic Description, Implied Cannibalism, M/M, Murder, Mutilation, Necromancy, Necrophilia, Period-Typical Sexism, Poverty, Sad with a Happy Ending, Self-Discovery, Sex, is it really necrophilia if they're trying their hardest to come back from the dead??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:41:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26440570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neonheartbeat/pseuds/neonheartbeat
Summary: When young Mrs. Rey Solo loses her husband to an accident in the coal mines of the Appalachian Mountains, she does her best to do her grieving, but a string of strange murders begin to center themselves about her, casting her own sanity into doubt in her mind. Something is haunting the shadows of Walker's Hollow, and she must discover what it is...
Relationships: Finn & Rey (Star Wars), Kaydel Ko Connix & Rey, Leia Organa & Rey, Poe Dameron & Finn & Rey, Poe Dameron/Finn, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 363
Kudos: 276
Collections: Spooky Gems





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> mind the tags!!! I'll update them as time goes on. 
> 
> without further ado:

**1913**

The bitterly cold, damp November morning engulfed Mrs. Rey Solo as she stumbled, half-dressed, from her home, nearly falling down the rickety wooden porch steps, and ran as fleet as a deer to the end of the road all lined with miner’s shanties made the same as hers. Mist swirled about her form, dressed in a nightgown, a shawl and nothing else: her long brown hair had come half-undone from its braid, and her face bore the wild, terrified look of a cornered animal. It was still dark, not yet sunrise, nor yet late enough for the miners to have risen from their beds and begun the long march into the underground labyrinths of bituminous coal, but she knew her way well enough that she needed no light. Her bare feet left prints in the pristine frost on the ground, where not a single mule or wheel had yet left a track. 

She staggered up finer steps than those she had come down, and threw herself against an oak door with as much force as she could, crying out, “Dr. Dameron! Dr. Dameron!” and her voice was near to weeping, thick with fear and horror. “Open the door!” She beat on the door with her fists, casting terrified looks back over her shoulder. Inside, behind the lace curtain, a light went on, and then the door opened, revealing a stunned, handsome man with sleep-tousled dark hair and a finely formed Mediterranean face beneath. Mrs. Solo nearly fell into the man, who wore only his nightshirt and his trousers half-on, and carried a kerosene lamp. “Doctor,” she gasped, trembling all over. 

“Mrs. Solo, what on earth is the matter?” he asked, raising her up with one hand. “You have been gone all night. Have you had some trouble? You are half-frozen. Come inside. What is it?”

As he guided her across the threshold and barred the door, she stood halfway, and covered her mouth with one hand, shaking her head sharply, as if afraid to speak. The lamp illuminated her face: younger than the doctor’s by fifteen years, perhaps, and pretty, but no less lined with exhaustion, and pale as ash. “You must tell me,” she whispered, clinging to his brown hand with sudden force. Her eyes bored into his. “Tell me, Doctor: you were the one to declare him dead, weren’t you?”

Dameron paused. The woman’s demeanor was concerning to him both personally and professionally, and he did not wish to distress her. “I was,” he said softly.

“My late husband, I mean,” she added, as if there was some doubt about which dead man she meant.

“Yes, Mrs. Solo. Your husband was dead beyond any doubt when they brought him here. What has that to do with the state you are in?”

She closed her eyes and opened them again, her lips trembling. “I am afraid I am going mad,” she said, voice breaking all to pieces. “Mad, I am mad, I must be mad, I thought— I thought—”

“What? What did you think?” Dameron asked gently, but no matter how he prodded, the young widow remained silent, shaking her head with silent tears streaming down her face. 

* * *

**SIX MONTHS EARLIER**

“Do you have your lunch pail?” called out Rey, wiping her flour-covered hands on the cleanest rag she could find as she turned her head towards the shanty’s door, where her husband was slipping on his jacket in the pre-dawn light.

“I have,” he answered, his low voice careful and deliberate, a smile playing in it. “And I saw the extra cornbread. Thank you kindly.”

“You need it, Ben. You’re twice the size of half those men,” she told him, stirring the pot over the stove before darting back to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Stew tonight. Potato. Don’t be late.”

“I may be anyway, catfish mouth,” he said, chucking her under the chin. “Keep it warm. Foreman wants to talk about that supervisor position.”

“For certain sure?” Rey was delighted: he had mentioned it last week, but she had thought it was a passing fancy. “And you didn’t tell me!” She flicked him with the towel. “Get to going, then, Mr. Supervisor Benjamin Solo.” He ducked out the door with a grin, and she lost herself in thoughts of being a supervisor’s wife. 

How lovely: a nicer house, lace curtains, maybe even a second bedroom! And fresh meat every Sunday, instead of only when the company store decided to have salted pork on hand in exchange for scrip. She went back to making bread. It was a Monday, so bread must be done for the week today: then dinner would cook slow all day over the wood stove, and the clothes must be washed— coal dust had worked itself so deeply into most of Ben’s work clothes that not even lye could take it out, but his Sunday best needed washing, and he was particular about how he looked Sundays when his mother was in attendance, so she liked to take special care with both their clothes Monday mornings.

Rey finished kneading the bread dough and left it to rise, then walked out to start the wash-fire. Smoke stung her eyes in the spring morning as she stoked it up, waving hello to the other wives and children in the yards of the shanties close by to hers. The sun rose up, higher and higher, and she pounded and scrubbed her good cotton shirtwaist with its camisole and Ben’s Sunday shirt in the boiling cauldron until her shoulders ached, then levered them out with her pole and set them to cool before hand-washing on the board, where she sat on her stool and scrubbed over the corrugated steel. 

She sometimes missed the days where all she had done every day was go to school. It did not seem as if it had been long ago at all, these days— and it hadn’t been, to be truthful. She was only nineteen, after all, and she had left school at sixteen, later than most girls did, but only because she had wanted to be a teacher like old Mrs. Solo, who was now her Mother Solo, the schoolmistress. Down the road, she knew, the schoolhouse still stood, where Mother Solo was inside at this moment, teaching small children their letters and ciphering and history. 

Her own first day, she had been very small: five or six, sitting in the front, her braids stiff and tight, her feet not even touching the floor as they swung under the hem of her drab gray dress. Mrs. Solo had seemed perfectly huge, enormous, a lady with strict eyes and a firm hand on that ruler, and her son Ben had been thirteen, a big boy itching to go and be a real miner already, whose feet not only hit the floor in the desks in the back of the schoolroom but whose knees had to stick out on both sides because they simply did not fit. 

Rey smiled to remember it. The second day, he had tugged on her braids, laughing at how tightly they had been done up, and she had snatched up Mrs. Solo’s ink-pot and dumped it over his head, sending the class into an uproar. She had been paralyzed with terror of a beating before the whole school for her awful crime, but Mrs. Solo had chastised her son instead, saying he ought not to have teased her, and then Ben had slunk, red-faced and ink-stained, from the room. The third day, he had brought her a penny as an apology, and she had bought all the candy it could buy from the company store with the greatest delight she had ever known. Yes, Mrs. Solo was a fair teacher, and from then on Rey had gotten along with her very well. 

Both of her parents had died before then. She could not remember when, but she knew Papa had died in a mine collapse when she was two, and Mama had died of tuberculosis soon after that, but somehow Rey had straggled on: the town had not sent her off to an orphanage, and she had been looked after by Mrs. Solo and by a few other families who could afford to feed another mouth from time to time, and then at fourteen, about the time she had been helping Mrs. Solo to teach the eight year olds geography, she had looked at Ben across the table at Sunday dinner and thought  _ why, he is twenty-one, a man grown now, and I am a woman, aren’t I?  _ He had regarded her with only shy respect ever since the ink-pot incident, but since certain changes had begun to take root and shape her body into something strange and new, she found herself courting very strange new feelings and thoughts about all manner of things, and especially regarding Ben Solo.

It had not been a quick courtship, either: Mrs. Solo warned her to think long and hard about whether she truly wanted the life of a miner’s wife, and they had not wed until Rey was eighteen and Ben was twenty-five— practically an old bachelor by all accounts in Walker’s Hollow. He was a decent husband, though: not given to drink or any sort of vice, and always kind to her.

As Rey rinsed the clothes and wrung them, hanging them to dry in the soft spring air, she thought what a nice change being a supervisor’s wife would be. Over the past year they had been married, she had never complained of her lot in life, but Ben had promised a better life one day for them both. She knew his mother had once had dreams for him: dreams of something more than this mining town, with coal dirt ingrained into his skin. Perhaps, Rey thought, pinning the clothes tight and walking back up the rickety steps, this would be a step up, to lead to another step up and so on. Perhaps they might have children, living in a supervisor’s house.

True, there had been no hint of children yet, but that was hardly a mystery. Ben spent his time at home either eating or sleeping, and left before dawn every morning. Rey was not concerned overmuch in that regard. Most of the other wives she knew complained of their husbands’ unwanted advances, but Rey, truth be told, had the opposite of such a problem. There had been a wedding night, and after that not much else, save for a few chance encounters: sometimes she wished for him to be more forthcoming, but did not know how to ask frankly yet.  _ That is all right: it has only been a year, that will all come later, _ she thought, checking the rising dough and the simmering stew. The dough was ready, so she shaped the loaves and put them into the oven to bake. Everyone said so, anyway: that love often came after marriage, and Rey was just fine with that.

As she beat out their rag rug, a distant rumble shook the ground, and she ignored it. Dynamite was the fastest way to get the coal wrenched out from its seams in the earth, and it seemed every day they had little earthquakes. A wonder that all the shanty houses were not shaken to their foundations every day! She continued going about her day, doing all the chores.

The sun was setting. The five o’clock whistle blew its shrill, sharp cry over the hills and trees of Walker’s Hollow, and Rey set the table for dinner. The front porch creaked as Ben came up the steps in the familiar  _ thump, thump, thump-thump _ step of heavy boots and stamping off coal dust, black to the brows ( she could see him through the window) and washing his hands and face on the porch in the bucket she always left for him until the water was black and he looked like a human and not an overgrown tommyknocker. He came in through the door, ducking his head at her greeting, and sat at table, lines of coal dust he had not been able to get out marking out the creases by his eyes and mouth and the still-fresh scar from that pickaxe a few months back that ran from his brow to his jaw down the right side of his face. She put the stew on the table and ladled it onto his plate. “Eat before it gets cold,” Rey advised, stirring it. “And there’s fresh bread.” She noted he had not carried in his lunch pail, and sighed. “Have you left your pail at the mine again?” she asked, shaking her spoon at him in mock admonishment.

Ben half-smiled and opened his mouth, as if to speak, when a solemn, firm knock on the door made her look toward it, startled: who was calling so late? “Hold a moment,” she called, wiping her hands on her apron and looking up at Ben.

He was gone. 

Nobody sat in the chair he had just been sitting in. Steam curled off the stew in the place she had set for him, but he was not there.

  
Rey’s blood ran cold as ice, and she knew: she  _ knew  _ who was at the door, and why. Blind with horror, she stumbled to the door and opened it, and there, yes: there was the foreman, his hat off, and behind him Dr. Dameron, that acquaintance of old Mrs. Solo’s, who also clutched his hat in his hands, looking pale and grim. “Mrs. Solo,” said the foreman, determination in his face, “it is with the greatest regret and grief I must say…”


	2. Chapter 2

_ There’s been a mistake,  _ she tried to tell them at first, sick with shock, disbelief.  _ He was here, he was just here with me, right at the table before you knocked— _ but they did not believe her, not even Dameron, who only looked at her with dark, sad eyes and offered her brandy. Not even Mother Solo, who wept when Rey came into her house, her small frame seeming to shrivel even smaller with grief. 

Nobody took her to see him, though she asked and asked, and at last Dameron lost his patience with the foreman and shouted, “The poor woman’s lost her husband and has a right to bid him farewell!”

The men took her, then, foreman and two miners he had known and Dr. Dameron, to Dameron’s house in the middle of town, the dark blue dusk making her think of the stories of things that lurked in the woods: monsters, the Devil himself, witches. The circle of pale light cast by the lantern was safe, as long as she stayed in it, she thought idiotically, like a child afraid of the dark. They all went into Dameron’s surgery, by the long table, where lay a broad, still form wrapped all in thick canvas, vaguely man-shaped. The doctor lifted the light and drew back the sheet of canvas at the figure’s waist, and Rey saw a left hand.

Pale, that hand in its coal-dusted sleeve, from sunless days spent beneath the ground. Pale, and thick, with blunt fingers and black-creased nails and knuckles: a hand she knew at once, and a gold ring on the ring finger she knew as well. “That was his father’s,” she said, and her voice sounded so unlike her own that she reeled a moment, Dameron’s steady arm holding her up. “I ought to take it home to his mother, if you— I—” Rey reached out and tugged it off his hand, tears welling up at the touch. The flesh under her fingers was cold and inert, but the gold was warm. It had left a white ring around his coal-blacked finger, and she clutched it in her palm, trembling as the men’s words flowed over her, around her:  _ dynamite went off too soon— poor soul likely felt nothing, probably still doesn’t know he’s dead—  _ and Dameron, speaking softly:  _ I am sorry you brought him all the way to me for nothing. _

“I want to see his face,” she said suddenly, feeling as though she might be sick with the want of it.

“I would not advise it, Mrs. Solo,” said Dameron in the gentlest tones. “You are in a state of shock.”

“You don’t understand me,” she insisted, eyes fixed on the form. “He was alive. I know he was. He was in the kitchen with me… he washed his hands, his face: why are his hands still dirty?” Bewildered, she looked from man to man. Not a face held an answer, only pity, and she hated it. Why didn’t they understand that this was impossible? The wedding ring felt as though it might burn a hole through her palm. “He was  _ with me, _ he had forgot his lunch pail…”

The two miners exchanged looks: one was black-haired and sallow, called Michael, and the other red-haired. “That is true,” said the red-haired one (Huxley, she remembered, the Irishman), “for the blast killed him after lunch and nobody brought it out of the mine. We forgot, ma’am.”

She closed her eyes. “He had, he had cornbread,” she babbled, like a child. “I sent him in with—did he, did he at least eat?” The thought that he might have died hungry and alone was too much to bear.

“He ate, ma’am,” said Michael respectfully. “He gave me his extra cornbread. Said you’d sent him with too much and he had no need for it, and it was much appreciated, ma’am.”

She began to weep, and sank to her knees, and knew nothing more for a long, long time.

* * *

“You needn’t look so frightened,” said Mrs. Solo fondly, adjusting the little white tea rose into Rey’s hair. “It’s a wedding, my dear, not the guillotine, and besides, I thought you liked my son well enough.”

“I do,” Rey said, terribly frightened she would stain her Sunday best dress with something, and entirely preoccupied with the fear of the marital bed. She set her chin a little higher and said, “Just what is it, exactly, I am expected to do in... in bed with him?”

Mrs. Solo nearly choked laughing. “Gracious, child,” she said. “No, do not blush. I forgot you had no mother to tell you these things, so I must find myself instructing two parties to the same wedding on the matter. Lord on high. Well, you’ve seen what jacks and mares do to make mules and such, haven’t you?”

“Mules?” Rey asked, uncomprehending. “Yes, I suppose.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Solo, very pink in the nose, “well— that, then, and now you must call me Mother Solo, for you will be my daughter by law.”

They had walked to the little white clapboard church, where the Methodist minister was waiting for them— Reverend Walker, Mrs. Solo’s brother, gray-haired and fine in his suit, stood at the altar, and Rey walked up with trembling hands on Mrs. Solo’s arm as she gave her to Ben, who stood waiting, head bowed, shy of her still, hands clasped to each other. 

She hardly remembered any of the wedding, later. 

Her thoughts were occupied with mules. 

* * *

“You have been a widow these past two months,” said the curt, rough voice of the company store owner, shaking Rey from her reverie.

“I have,” she answered, dry-eyed and resolute as she clutched the scrip in her hands. “I need flour. A five-pound bag.”

He scoffed rudely, but got down a sack from the shelf. Plut was a mean man, she knew: haggling, scrapping, never giving anyone a good bargain, even though he ought to have. “You shan’t be able to buy anything I have before long, with no husband to provide.”

“I am working,” she said evenly, “as a teacher. The company pays me my own scrip now, and my affairs are no concern of yours.”

“My, aren’t you a sharp little thing,” he said, putting the five-pound bag back. “I have just recalled: there are no more five-pound bags, only one-pound parcels.”

Her temper rose. “You have it just there. Give it to me.”

“It has been set aside for Dr. Dameron,” said Plut, eyes gleaming with malice. “And all the rest are set aside, too. You ought to watch your tongue, or I may remember that there are no more one-pound parcels left, either.”

Rey fought her own fury a moment. “Then I want five one-pound parcels,” she said.

“You have forgot your manners,” said Plut, sneering.

She weighed the idea of snatching up the nearest spade and boxing his ears with it against groveling, and decided that groveling must do, as she had nobody to defend her now. “I would like five one pound parcels, if you please, sir,” she said.

“That’s better,” he said, getting down the parcels for her. “Give me one dollar.”

She bit her tongue against the protest that swelled up, and handed over the dollar in scrip she had: struck cheap with the company’s name, First Coal Company, gleaming dully in the light from outside. Plut took it, looked at it, and set it away, then handed her five parcels, which she struggled to stack into an easily-carried pack. He watched her struggle a moment, and smiled like a shark. 

“If you would like some twine to pack it,” he said, “that will be another fifty cents.”

Rey bought the twine and walked out much poorer than she had come in, carrying all her flour in separate pounds wrapped in twine like a fool, back to Mother Solo’s house.

* * *

Ben had not had to go to work on the day of their wedding, and it seemed that he did not know what to do with himself all the day long. They left the church at noon, and signed the register at the office in town, and then walked back together to the shanty-house that Ben had been given when he had started to work in the mines six years back. He opened the door for her, and Rey stepped in, expecting a dreadfully bare bachelor’s house with not even a rug on the floor nor a towel by the stove, but was pleasantly surprised. Ben kept his house well— the stove was clean, the floor swept, the table wiped, and there was a vase of flowers on the table, fresh and fragrant. She crossed to it and smelled the blooms, smiling a little. 

“Do you like them?” he asked, in his quiet, unsure manner. 

“I do,” she said, looking up to see the bed, made up and ready behind its half-drawn curtain that screened it from the rest of the one-room house. Her belly trembled unpleasantly.  _ Mules.  _ She turned to him, anxious to avoid the subject. “Have you, do you— what do you want me to make you for dinner?”

“Oh,” he said, sounding surprised. “Well. I’m partial to cornbread, I guess, but I’ll eat most anything.”

“Ah,” said Rey, looking at the rag rug on the floor by the bed and suddenly feeling a great fool: this was her husband, now, and she was not a girl of fourteen anymore. “Did your mother, did she mention…” It was no good, she could not make herself plain for embarrassment. “Mules?” she finished, red to the ears.

“Mules?” repeated Ben, mystified. “Why— oh.” His face turned just as red as hers. “She may have mentioned a subject relating to their behaviors. Do you mean to say she said the same to you?”

“Oh, God,” said Rey, covering her eyes. She had never spoken like this to a man in her life, or indeed to anyone. “I asked what, what—I mean to say that she said I must do as mules do, but what that means I wouldn’t know.”

His large nose was crimson. “We needn’t—it—if you like, we may only do it once so that the marriage is legally binding and all, and then I shan’t bother with it again if you dislike it.”

_ Do it? _ What could be meant by that? Rey squared her shoulders and tried to think. Mules—jacks and mares. She had seen them during breeding season: the jacks with great big things hanging down to their knees, sniffing at the mares. There was always quite a bit of standing and running away and coming back to sniff, until the jack leaped up on his back legs and climbed the mare for a moment, then got down, both going back to nibbling grass and hay in the pens. Surely Mother Solo could not have meant that she was to expect Ben to run about and sniff her like that, or that he must leap up onto her back. “I am at a loss,” she said finally, ashamed of her own ignorance in the matter. “To know what to do, I mean. You— you must explain it to me plainly.”

“I thought I might,” he said after a moment, looking very resolute. “Well, then. You come along to the bed when you like, and I’ll show you what’s to be done.”

* * *

“And here,” said Rey, pointing to the blackboard, “you may see the terrain of the Appalachian Mountain range, which runs from Georgia in the South to Maine in the North, and contains all the coal that your papas mine every day.” The children’s faces looked up at her, fascinated, as she continued. “Who can tell me what sorts of coal there are?” A boy raised his hand. “John?”

“Anthracite,” he said carefully, trying not to stumble over the words. “Lignite. Bite-bituminous. And, and…” The boy frowned, trying to remember, and looked to her for help.

“Sub-bituminous,” Rey said gently. “Very good, John. Anthracite is the highest quality of coal…”

She spoke on, ignoring the rumble in her belly. Her last foray to the company store had been fruitless entirely, and she refused to let Mother Solo go without breakfast.  _ I just shall not eat today, that is all, _ she thought, resolved to carry on. 

At noon, she let the children go for lunch, and a girl skipped up to her, digging into her pail. “Teacher,” she said, in a soft little voice, her sweet hazel eyes fringed with long lashes, “I brought you something. Emily said I must, since you are a widow now.”

It was a little parcel of blueberries, fresh-picked from the bushes in the mountains. Rey felt tears spring to her eyes as she looked at them. “May Ella,” she said, “you are very kind, and so is Emily. But I cannot take these. You ought to eat them yourself.” Ben’s wedding ring was warm where it rested on her thumb: she wore it every day along with her own ring, though it was too big to fit anywhere else.

“No, Teacher! Emily said I must make you take them. Mama said you ought to take all the help you could get, for you are too proud to stand on chairs.”

“I think you mean charity,” said Rey, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. “All right, then. I will eat them. Thank you, May Ella.”

The girl hurried back to her seat to eat with her friends, and Rey ate the blueberries. They burst on her tongue, tasting of summer, and she tried very hard to not weep in front of her class. 

When the five o’clock whistle blew, she let the children go and went about her usual duties: she swept the floor clean, put everything away, set the room to rights for the next day, and shut the windows. She was wiping the blackboard clean of chalk dust in the dusk, lit only by the kerosene lamp, when a cool gust of air drifted across her neck, above the collar of her shirtwaist.

Cool air? It was August, and all the windows had been shut. There must be some draft. She ought to get someone to fix it. Rey set the rag down and turned, but not even a paper moved in the air of the schoolroom. As she picked her satchel and lamp up and began to walk down the row of desks to the door, she heard a sound that stopped her dead in her tracks. 

_ Thump, thump, thump-thump.  _ It was the sound of someone walking up the steps to the schoolhouse in heavy miner’s boots. She knew it well, for she had heard it a hundred times before, when Ben was coming home. Two heavy steps up, then a quick double step, to knock the dirt and coal dust off his boots… but Ben was dead: dead and buried these three months past...

Rey froze in her step. “Hello?” she called out, quelling her frantic mind: it must be someone’s father, someone coming to ask a question.

Nobody answered. She forced herself to step forward. The dusk was deepening, and the hand carrying her lamp trembled. Rey knew: she  _ knew _ she had heard steps come up to the door. Someone was waiting, just outside. She reached for the handle, her heart pounding. Someone  _ was _ out there. She would open the door, and— 

She flung the door wide. Nobody was there. The porch was empty, the steps clear, but Huxley, the Irishman, was hurrying down the path with a lantern, waving to her. “Mrs. Solo!” he called.

Rey swallowed and put the lamp out. Her mouth had gone to dry cotton. “Huxley?” she asked, turning to lock the door. “Did you see anyone at the door just now?”

“No, ma’am, only yourself,” he answered, coming to the bottom of the step. “I have been sent to fetch you. Have you not heard?”

“Heard what?” asked Rey, fear gripping her: surely nothing had happened to Mother Solo in her absence.

“Plut. He’s dead. Catamount, most likely. Nobody ought to walk home alone in the dark: that’s what Dr. Dameron said.”

“Plut is dead?” repeated Rey, bewildered as she stepped down and joined him, walking along the road in the twilight. “A panther? Was Plut walking through the woods, out of the Hollow?”

“No, he was not,” said Huxley, shaking his head. “They found him strung up by his ankle in the storeroom, mauled to death. Forgive me— you are a lady.”

“Catamounts and panthers and such cannot string anybody up by their ankles,” said Rey.

“No, they cannot. The doctor thinks it was some wild accident— it appears he stepped into a loop of hauling-rope and the weight came loose, knocked off by the panther, he said.”

“Oh,” said Rey. “Perhaps the cat was hungry and lured in by the smell of pork being salted.”

“Most like,” agreed Huxley. “Shall I take you to old Mrs. Solo, or—”

“Yes, if you please,” said Rey quickly. She had refused to set foot in the other house, the one she had shared with Ben for their short marriage, since the day they had put him in the ground. “I ought to stay with her if there’s a rogue panther stalking the hollow, anyway.”

When they got to the house, she thanked Huxley politely and went in. Mother Solo was darning a sock by the stove, a lamp on. “Good evening, Rey,” she said warmly. “You’re a bit late.”

“Huxley walked me home. He said a panther killed Plut at the company store warehouse.” Rey set her satchel down and washed her face in the basin. “Have you heard anything of it?”

“A panther?” exclaimed the lady. “Good Lord. That is bold of it, to come into the Hollow in broad daylight in the wrong season.”

“Season?” asked Rey. Mother Solo got up and went to the stove, taking out cornbread and stew. 

“Yes: their mating season is November to March, and they do not usually move with such aggression in the summer-time. Poor Plut. Well, not poor Plut— he was a dreadful man, but still.”

“He was, for certain sure,” said Rey, trying to not devour the food on her plate all at once. She was famished, but she could not let Mother Solo see that. Some sorts of pride she still clung to. “I ought to ask Dr. Dameron tomorrow when I go in to get salt. Someone ought to know what happened, or have some idea. How did a panther get in unseen, anyway?”

“They’re quite careful when they have to be,” said Mother Solo. “And quiet, too. You might never know they are on you until it’s too late, and then they have dropped from the trees already. I am glad Huxley walked you home.” They ate together in companionable silence, until the older lady took her dishes to the bucket to be washed. “I wonder, my dear, if you are considering marrying again,” she said gently.

“I am not,” said Rey, stunned. “How could I be? To whom?”

“Well, there is Huxley. I hear he is soon to be the next superintendent: a head for numbers, they told me. And though he is Irish, he has none of the unfortunate traits—”

“God above,” Rey exploded, outraged, “can I not be left alone to grieve for any time before someone tells me I ought to marry again? Am I not allowed even that? He was your  _ son _ !”

“Yes, he was,” said Mother Solo, grief of her own playing across her face. “And he is gone to Heaven, as my brother says, and now I have only you, my dear daughter. I am near sixty-five, not long for this mortal plane, and if I leave you uncared for and unsupported, what sort of mother by law would I be— or mother at all?”

Rey felt guilty. Of course, old Mother Solo was only trying to help, but— “I am a good teacher,” she managed. “You were a good teacher, and a widow, too.”

“That was a different time,” said Mother Solo. “I could get by, back when the company was not so vicious with its prices and policy. I do not know what may come for you, or whether a teacher’s money will be enough to live on, and I know you do not like to stand on charity. You must think not of yourself, but of your future.”

Rey closed her eyes. “And you think I ought to set my sights on Huxley, for he is to be superintendent?”

Mother Solo looked very tired. “I am only saying you ought to keep your eyes on what is in front of you, dear Rey. There is no shame in taking a second husband. We women must do what we must to live in this hard world.”

_ So must panthers, _ thought Rey, and sat silently, staring into the stove-fire.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mention of spousal abuse and child death!
> 
> also description of some pretty gnarly gore towards the end. i ought to put this in a reyloween collection lmao

**1912**

The bedroom was tiny, but larger than Rey had been used to: a bed just big enough for two, owing, likely, to the fact that Ben was broad enough through the shoulder and waist to need it. She stepped into the room, lifting the curtain and letting it fall behind her. Evening had begun to fall, and after she had thoroughly explored the little shanty house and taken off her Sunday best jacket, putting it away carefully, she finally felt the courage to step past that barrier and into whatever was awaiting her there.

It was only Ben. He sat on the bed in his clean trousers and shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbow. She had never seen him in this particular state of undress, and felt very discomfited… but they were married, now, so why shouldn't he undress in their house? His dark, fresh-washed waves of hair fell to just below his ears as he raised his head to look at her. 

She had always liked his face.  _ Funny face, _ she had teased him as a child, and he had called her  _ catfish mouth _ right back for her wide smile _ ,  _ and they had laughed at each other. Not exactly handsome, too uneven and long for that, but fine anyway: a strong nose with gentle eyes above and a full, soft mouth below. His hands were resting in his lap, fidgeting a little. “I’ve never… before,” he started, lamely, and Rey swallowed. “If I hurt you—everyone said it might hurt you, and seemed to think it was to be expected. But I don’t— I won’t hurt you, so if it hurts you, you got to tell me and I’ll stop straightaway.”

Rey considered this. Pain she was no stranger to, but this was new territory— and how badly could this mysterious act really hurt, if all married people did it? “I’ll tell you,” she said. “How do we… start off, then?”

Ben gulped. His thick throat bobbed above his open collar. “Well,” he said, looking everywhere but at her, “well, come here and sit by me a minute.” He patted the bed, on the quilt, and Rey stepped in, smoothing her skirt before she sat down on the bed by him. 

He was very close. The heat of him soaked into her, even just sitting beside him, and after a moment he took her hand, gentle and cautious. That, she knew: she had held his hand once or twice before the wedding, and liked it. “This is nice,” she said softly, sure he was just as anxious as she was about it all.

Ben stole a sideways glance at her and nodded. “It is,” he agreed, and rubbed his thumb gently over her knuckles, soft, even strokes. She liked that, too, and thought perhaps having a husband would be no bad thing. “The thing is,” he said, turning her hand over and moving his attention to her wrist, “I, we—everyone— the miners, I mean, the married ones— they said I ought to not tell you beforehand. Because they said it might scare you out of the house. But I know you ain’t— have never been scared of anything in your life, Rey.”

Her mouth was dry. It wasn’t from fear. “I have not,” she said. “Go on and tell me, then.”

“I—” Ben was red to the ears. “Oh, Lord. I can’t say it. I’m, I’m—” He stood a moment, pacing a little in the room. It seemed too small to contain the size of him, and he paused, looking at the wall. “I’m supposed to put… it inside you,” he said, his voice cracking as it had not done since he was a boy of thirteen. 

“Put _what_ inside me?” said Rey, entirely taken off guard.

“Me,” he said, turning to her and looking ashen. “My, my—surely you’ve seen naked boys swimming in the crick?”

“Your—  _ what? _ ” she said, shocked, and then suddenly it fell into place like a plank in a floor: the jacks, the mounting, the mares. “Holy Jesus,” she said, covering her mouth. 

Ben visibly recoiled from her expression. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I truly am. Men, men like it, but women don’t care for it, I don’t think. Or at least all the men said so. If you don’t want to, we needn’t do it tonight, either.”

“No,” said Rey, reeling. “No, we ought to do it, just so the marriage is a true one.” She could not think straight at all: what an idea! And yet... “If all those other wives can do it, I can: I’ve got more backbone than half of them and twice as much nerve.”

“That you do,” Ben said, looking more at ease. “Well. Do you— you could just put your skirts up for me, if you like.”

Rey swallowed. So this was it, then. “I think—yes,” she said, and bent down, unlacing her shoes and taking them off before pulling up her dark blue skirt, then her petticoat, then her knickers. Ben’s eyes, dark and suddenly hungry, trained themselves on her legs in their thin summer stockings. Curiosity burned suddenly in her belly. “Can I... see you?” she asked, half-shy.

He nodded and fumbled with his trousers, still staring at her exposed calves, and pulled them down to show her. Her first instinct was to laugh: it was pink and pale, half-soft, thick and heavy, with crisp hair like her own where it sprouted from his body, but as he stepped closer, eyes still fixed on her, it changed to something solid and hard like the handle of a pickaxe, flushing a rosy color. “Rey,” he said, voice dropped down deeper than the mines, and she shut her eyes in terror of whatever would come next: surely that thing could not fit inside her. “I promised you. Promised I’d be nice to you. Remember. You tell me.”

“Oh, God,” she said, muffling her face with her hands. “Yes. I’ll tell you.”

“Good.” He sounded strained, and knelt on the floor, then lifted her skirts up further until they were gathered about her waist, one broad hand caressing the bare skin of her inner thigh, where it was soft and tender. “Pretty,” Ben whispered, and Rey could not move: she had never been touched like this in her life, and it made her belly go to water and her knees shake. One of his fingers traced a line through the soft, dark hair that furred between her legs, past the curls to her cleft, from the front to where she knew something ought to go, and he felt big: blunt and strong like the rest of him. “Nobody said you would be wet here,” he said, sounding surprised, and stroked her there again. His finger slipped past her, into her, and she let out a soft moan— that had felt nice, and had not hurt at all. “Sorry,” Ben said quickly, and the finger left her. “I didn’t mean—”

“No,” she protested weakly, opening her eyes. Ben looked stricken. “No… it was fine. I wouldn't mind if you did it again.”

“Oh,” he said, and bent his head again, finding the place, and gently pushing his finger in. “Like…”

“Yes,” Rey said, fighting to control herself. Suddenly, the prospect of marital relations in full did not seem so absurd. “You, you, you can put the other part into me, if you—”

“The other—” Ben withdrew his hand and laid her down on the bed, crawling over her, the skirt and petticoat still wadded up between their bellies as he grasped himself with his hand, guiding it in. “Oh, God Almighty,” he gasped, and Rey shut her eyes again tight, too nervous to watch as he worked the thick, blunt tip into her. It felt strange as anything, but did not hurt, and she resolved to endure it to the end. “D-don’t tell my uncle I was cussing in bed,” he panted, slipping in another inch, and Rey couldn’t help but giggle, which must have done something to her down-there parts, because it made him groan and slip in some more, and some more, until he was pushed right up against her, his face buried in her neck, warm air gusting down her shoulder and soaking through her shirtwaist. “You ain’t hurt none?” he panted.

“No,” she said, staring at the ceiling. She only felt very full of him, and as if her belly was afire. “Is that it, then?”

“Not yet,” he answered, lifting his head, and she could see the way his eyes were near-black, his face beaded with sweat. “Little more. It won’t be long, though. Just… a minute is all. If that.”

“All right, then,” she said, and Ben got more up on his arms, so that he was putting his weight on his own body and not hers, and started moving his hips, thrusting and rubbing inside her like a piston going wild. Rey could not stop the cry from bursting from her lips: it felt  _ good, _ so good, but good in a way that she had never felt.  _ I’ll die if it stops, I’ll die if it keeps on, _ she thought wildly, gritting her teeth to bear it. 

He noticed. “Rey?” he gasped, the movements halting, stuttering. “Rey, I’m—”

“No,  _ don’t _ ,” she cried at the loss, and Ben’s frantic movements unraveled entirely, a grunt echoing through the room as he bared his own teeth, eyes shut tight, and Rey could not keep the disappointment from spreading to her face. “Oh,” she said, looking down as he pulled himself out of her, a thick, wet dollop of some whitish stuff dripping off it. 

“It’s, it’s just spunk,” he said, sounding like he’d run a mile. He could not look at her in the face. “I’ll get, I’ll, for you to clean it up. Cold water’ll take it out.” She felt a dribble leak out as he got up on wobbly knees, his chest heaving, and lay there until he had come back with a wet towel. Rey sat on it and sat up, feeling as if she had been knocked off-kilter. Her hair was coming down. Ben stood there doing his pants back up, his cockstand going limp and soft again, and still did not look at her. 

“Did it… hurt you?” she asked, at a loss for what to say. Without him between her legs, it felt only aching, and stung a little. 

A choked sound came out of his throat. “You're kind to ask me, when I'm the one who hurt you,” he said shortly, head hanging low. “And when I promised not to. I, I couldn’t stop myself from— from coming off as I did. Are you hurt bad?”

Rey could only say, “Not too bad. I think it’ll be sore for a while,” and tried to think what on earth to say to assure him she had not been hurt. How could she tell him that her shout had been from overwhelming and strange delight, and not from pain, when women did not enjoy the act? There must be something the matter with her. Perhaps it was better that she keep it to herself. 

Ben looked miserable. “You can have the bed. I’ll sleep on the floor. You— you’ll want a bath, so I’ll set water to boil. And I’m real sorry for it.” He left, then, through the curtain, and Rey could only sit there with her mouth open, stunned, wanting to explain, to tell him that he had done nothing wrong— but there were no words for her to use, so she sat and said nothing at all.

* * *

The funeral was warm, too warm for the spring. Rey stood, swaying, on Mother Solo’s arm, wearing the dark blue skirt and jacket she had worn to be married in, and watched with sightless eyes as Reverend Walker spoke a sermon over the casket, rough-hewn oak, shut tight. 

Most of the hollow had shown up, since it was a Sunday: wives and miners, children in their Sunday best with big solemn eyes— this was not the first funeral that they had attended in their short lives. The sermon was all about the hope of the Resurrection and the Last Day of Judgment, and how all sinners ought to take heed else they perish in everlasting fire. Rey hated every second of it. 

When it was over, the casket was lowered into the hole in the cemetery. It was bigger than most, and the men struggled to lay it in evenly, but got it down all right. Rey walked to the edge, picked a handful of grave-dirt up in shaking fingers, and thought for a moment that if she just never threw it down, if she only stood there on the rim of the hole between life and death, that he would not truly be dead.

She threw the handful. It spattered against the casket, dry and dark, and a sob wrenched itself from her throat.  _ No,  _ she wanted to cry aloud,  _ no, he’ll be too cold come winter, with no one, alone, in the dark. I can’t leave him in that hole, I can’t… _

But she had to, so she did—after pulling out a penny from her pocket: a real, copper penny with Lincoln’s head on it, not company scrip, and pressed it into the dirt at the head of the grave.  _ Now you’ll have something to call your own, and you won’t be alone, _ she thought, turning and walking away with Mother Solo.

* * *

**1913**

“You cannot pull May Ella from school, Mrs. Bowers,” said Rey, astonished, as she stared at the haggard face of the woman in front of her desk. “She is a smart child, and already knows all forty-eight states in America by name, and she is too young to leave— only nine years old.”

“I need her at home,” said Mrs. Bowers, who looked decades older than her twenty-nine years. “She is the oldest, and I have five other babes at home what need looking after: seven, six, four, two, and the baby.”

_ Five babes?  _ “Mrs. Bowers, she is only nine. She cannot be a nursemaid to her own siblings at such a young age, she—”

“And d’you think I can?” shouted Mrs. Bowers, trembling. “With Johnny in the mines all the livelong day, and only three of the children in school? You try looking after a babe on the teat, a two-year-old, and a four-year-old all at once, and see how you like it!”

“I am not saying I do not empathize with your plight, Mrs. Bowers, but—”

“Oh, you shut your mouth,” said the woman, lip trembling. “You think you’re ever so high-falutin’ and mighty, with your big words and your airs and such, being a teacher. You ain’t got a right to lord it over me. I remember when you were an orphan and nobody wanted you about, save for charity, which is how you got to be where you are, and if your husband had lived long enough to give you children, you know as well as me that you’d be no teacher.”

Rey’s eyes welled up. Four months since Ben had died, and mention of him still cut her to the quick. “Get out of my schoolroom,” she said. “You may  _ not _ take May Ella out. If you keep her at home, I’ll come and drag her out myself.”

Mrs. Bowers’ face turned purple with rage as she jerked up out of her seat, the baby in her arms squalling at the sudden noise and movement. “Don’t you dare touch my May Ella! I’ll have Johnny beat you within an inch of your life!”

With a flurry of movement, Rey was out of her own seat, spitting hellfire. “You go on and send your damn husband, then,” she snarled, “and I’ll give him the licking of his life. Get  _ out _ of my schoolroom!”

Mrs. Bowers fled the building. Rey sank back down into her seat, feeling as though she might be ill. The September day was bright and crisp, and the children were all at play in the yard, watching the leaves turn from green to red, orange, gold: she hoped none of them had overheard the fight. 

A memory of Ben came back, sore to the touch like a bruise:  _ you got fight in you like a little wildcat, catfish mouth.  _ “Yes,” she said aloud, “but what good is that when you can’t use it?”

She did pity Mrs. Bowers, or would, when she stopped being so angry at her words. Married at nineteen, Helen Bowers had had ten children in as many years, but four of them had died from scarlet fever and typhus. May Ella was not the oldest: that honor went to the tiny stone in the cemetery marked  _ Beloved Son, 1902-1903.  _ Rumor had it that Helen was expecting yet again, too, with a babe still in the cradle. And yet what could a woman do, when her husband demanded his marital rights? You might fight him, or say no, but then you’d have a black eye and sore parts on top of it. 

Rey stood up and faced the window, looking out into the yard at the children playing. Half of those boys would be dead under the mountain in ten years: the other half old before their time, coated in dust. The girls, wives and mothers, half of them dead in the graveyard from childbed fever. She shuddered, and thought how strange it was that she, a widow, would live a longer life than a woman wed and bearing children. She might live to see these children’s children, and teach them too. It gave her a queer turn to think about. 

Her eye caught a shape at the edge of the yard, where the trees grew tall and thick, clustered in their resplendent foliage: something or someone seemed to be standing there, silent and unmoving. Rey frowned and squinted through the ripply glass of the window: the figure was shadowed by the trees, and did not appear to move at all.  _ Probably some old stump, _ she thought, disinterested, and let her eyes slip away.

The shape moved, quick and blurry, and Rey snapped her eyes back up at once to see, heart pounding, but could not make out the shape at all anymore.  _ The catamount? _ She raced to the door, ringing the bell: in the clarity of the air, there was nothing at the edge of the yard, but the children all looked up in surprise. “Come in!” she shouted, beckoning as her heart beat wildly. “Come along, now, let’s come in early. I have a book about President Washington to read. Come inside!”

* * *

**1912**

Rey slipped out of bed. It had been months since they had wed, and Ben still slept on the rug every night, despite the autumn chill in the air. She was cold, and tired of sleeping alone in such a big bed, and surely he did not want to be alone, either, so she had made up her mind to be bold. “Ben,” she whispered, tiptoeing out to the kitchen.

There he was, curled up on his side in front of the banked stove in the dark. “Ben,” she said again, and he stirred, sitting up and looking at her. She avoided looking at him— he was in only his union suit, the knit fabric clinging to every line and curve of his broad chest and shoulders. “Come to bed. It’s cold.”

“I don’t want to impose—”

“You won’t be.” She clutched her shawl tight at her throat. “Please. Just come.” She did not know how to say plainly that she wanted him in bed. 

Ben got up, his knees creaking, and stood by her, looking down at her for a moment. He was very big: tall, too— Rey was tall for a woman, but Ben made her feel small. “All right,” he said, amiable and gentle as always, and followed her to the bedroom, where she climbed in, huddling against the cold wall, using the quilt as a buffer as he crawled in after her and lay down.

He was better than the stove. Rey sighed, huddling closer to his body: he was very still, and she curled into him, pulling her feet up into her nightgown. “You sleep in here, now,” she said awkwardly, laying her hand on his arm, and he cleared his throat a little, turning over on his side to face her. “You’re a man married, and you oughtn’t to be cold and lonely in the dark.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said softly. 

* * *

“I hear you have been quarreling with Helen,” said Mother Solo, looking at her with some admonishment in her voice as Rey stepped into the house.

“Oh, to the devil with her,” said Rey crudely, setting her satchel down. “I think I saw that catamount again, and if it attacked in the summer, surely it will in the fall when they get fierce. I had to call the children in, and in the morning I’ll go up at once to see Dameron about telling the superintendents. Nobody ought to be out past dark if it is.”

“Don’t let my brother catch you swearing like that.” Mother Solo frowned, thinking for a moment. “Yes, I think you should go see Dameron. I will call on Helen in the morning and see if I cannot find a solution to her problem. Poor woman.”

“Poor woman indeed! She threatened to set her husband on me,” protested Rey. 

“Cornered creatures bite and scratch. You know that,” said Mother Solo, arching an eyebrow at her daughter-by-law. 

Rey grumbled under her breath, but they ate dinner quietly, and went to bed. She did not often sleep well these days, plagued by dreams of mines caving in, so she lay on the pallet in the kitchen that she refused to let Mother Solo sleep on (at her age, really, the woman ought to have the bed) and thought about Ben, the second time.

He had come home early one winter’s day, and she had been so delighted to have him for lunch and made a great fuss out of the unprecedented occasion. “You’re being silly,” he had said, laughing as he rarely did, his cheeks creasing into furrows of delight as she tugged him to the bedroom, shy, still, unsure. “Rey. Now, you oughtn’t—”

“It’s all right,” she had assured him, and then kissed him on the mouth as they’d only done a few times since the wedding… and the kiss, intended to be a quick, sweet thing, had gone deep, strong, like a current in a river— he had groaned into her mouth, all helpless and wanting, and she had tugged her skirts up again, thinking he would…

He hadn’t. He’d undone her shirtwaist and pressed a hundred kisses to her chest, over her chemise, wet mouth soaking the thin cotton until her nipples had stood out hard and cold, and then he’d kissed those, too. “You’re so pretty, Rey,” he’d whispered, cheek rubbing against her exposed skin like a great big cat— and he’d had cat’s eyes, too: elongated, hooded, near-triangular, golden-green-brown in the noon winter sun. 

“So’re you,” she’d told him, breathless and daring to finally ask for something small, something she knew she had liked. “Might you give me a, your, your finger? I, I liked it. The, the day we got married, I mean, when you...”

“Liked it?” he had echoed, and put his hand under her skirt, feeling for her, making her moan as he got his finger into her. “I’ll give you as many as you like. You just tell me. Tell me.”

“Ah,” she had panted. “Yes, m-maybe another—”

Ben had only worked a third in before he gave a shudder and a half-grunted cry, eyes squeezed shut, jaw working tightly, and she knew without being told that he’d come off in his pants, untouched. “Christ,” he’d said hoarsely, when he could speak again, and took his hand away, abashed. “I got to clean myself up.”

Rey had wanted him to stay, to let her help him: what an absurd notion! He was a man grown, and she was not a nursemaid… yet she wanted it anyway, but instead he had washed and gone out with a muttered word or two, scarlet to the ears, and had not come back until dinner...

Rey jolted awake. A commotion was going on outside the house, shouting, hammering. “Mother!” she shrieked, scrambling out of bed: was the house afire? “Mother Solo! Wake up!”

“Rey? What is it? What—” Mother Solo appeared in the kitchen in her nightgown, a shawl clutched tight about her shoulders, her long grey hair braided to her waist. Confusion was written across her face. “What is that racket?”

“Come out!” shouted the voice, a man’s voice, and Rey’s blood chilled in her veins: fire was sweeping back and forth in front of the door, red-orange light gleaming in patches from the window. “Come out, little miss schoolmarm, and I’ll show you what I think of little wildcats that tell me what t’ do with my own children!”

“Oh, God,” said Rey, shocked. “It’s John Bowers: Helen said she’d set him on me, but I didn’t think she meant  _ now _ .”

“Johnny Bowers? No—” began Mother Solo, stunned, but the window by the door smashed, making both women scream, startled. 

“I said come out, you cowardly little bitch!” roared John Bowers. “My children ain’t yours to do with as you please!”

Rey snatched a poker up from the stove. “If you had any balls on you, John Bowers, you’d say it to my face!” she screamed, making Mother Solo gape. “Mother, get back to the bedroom, quick.”

“He’ll burn the house down!” gasped the woman in terror. “Rey, don’t provoke him—”

There was a heavy, loud  _ whump,  _ as if something had dropped from the sky and landed on the porch: it was so heavy that the house trembled, and Rey dropped the poker and grabbed for Mother Solo as John Bowers let out a gurgling, choked, awful scream. A sound like flesh rending met their ears through the shattered window, and he screamed again and again, until with a final, wet ripping sound, he was silenced forever.

Rey, clutching Mother Solo, looked up. Through the broken window, a shape was moving in the dark. It was too dim to see the form of, but it paused before the window, hesitating—

And then it was gone, like a shadow covering stars: she could see the trees outside again through that little square, the dirt road in front, the shanty across the street whose lamps were flickering on, alerted or woken by the noise. “Mother,” she said, trembling all over. “Mother, oh God, oh God: he’s dead. The catamount. It must have been—”

“Is it gone?” asked Mother Solo, clinging to her. “Is it truly gone?”

“I think it looked at us,” said Rey, shaking so badly she could not stand. “I could not see clearly. Oh, God. We ought to fetch someone, the doctor, if, if John’s still alive—”

“He can’t be,” said Mother Solo, so pale she looked half-dead. “God, the  _ sounds. _ ”

Someone was crying out, by the door, just outside. “Get Dr. Dameron! Quickly! There’s been another attack!”

Rey struggled to her feet as the door swung open, the stricken face of Michael bursting in, Huxley close behind. “Mrs. Solo, are you all right?” asked Michael, and it did not matter which Mrs. Solo he meant. A waft of a stench like hot iron curled in, and Mother Solo retched. Rey clung to her arm. 

“God’s mercy,” said Huxley, covering his nose and staring down at the mess on the porch. “Dameron must— Michael, you run for the doctor, quick.”

Rey settled Mother Solo in her chair and got water set to boiling, moving like a machine until the old woman had a hot cup of tea in hand, and then threw on a coat over her nightgown, heading to the door. “I want to see,” she said firmly.

Huxley looked shocked. “You’re a lady, and you oughtn't to—”

“If it had not been for me, John Bowers would not have come here, and died,” she snapped, pushing him away. “Let me  _ see _ —” The mass of meat and blood and cloth on the porch was not recognizable as John Bowers, or indeed as any human being, at first glance. Rey swallowed back bile and forced herself to look, standing clear of the pool of cooling blood beneath the body. Ribs, snapped clear in half, jutted from what had been the chest, and a long tube near the clots of hair must have been the throat— in the mass of indistinguishable gore she could make out bits: a lung, a crushed spine, a shoe. Rey took a deep breath and turned to Huxley as men began to approach the house bearing lamps. “Do not let Mrs. Solo see this,” she said.

“No, ma’am,” said Huxley, looking queasy. 

Doctor Dameron, half-dressed and wearing a coat thrown over his clothes, but no waistcoat, came thumping up the steps. “Good Lord,” he said, staring at the remains. “Mrs. Solo, are you hurt?”

“No, none of us are hurt,” she answered, feeling curiously detached from the mess on her mother by law’s porch. Without a face or shape, it just seemed so much meat. “Someone ought to call on Helen Bowers and tell her.”

“Why was he here?” inquired Dameron, crouching by what might have been Bowers’ head, or perhaps his knee. It was impossible to tell. “Someone lift a light.”

“He was threatening me,” said Rey honestly. “He said he would teach me a lesson for the way I spoke to his wife today, saying their oldest daughter oughtn’t to leave school yet. She said she would send him… I am sorry, Doctor. I am not telling this correctly.” She leaned on the porch, breathing deeply. “He called me a cowardly little bitch.”

Hux sucked air into his teeth. “He shouldn’t have been out past nightfall. First Plut, now this.”

“Was Plut… like this?” asked Rey, gesturing at the remains. 

“Not so bad,” said Dameron absently, standing up. “His throat was torn out the same, and he had been disemboweled, hanging by one ankle— forgive me. You ought not to hear this.”

Rey was intrigued. “I thought I saw something in the woods by the schoolhouse today. I meant to call on you tomorrow and say something, tell the superintendent…”

Dameron frowned. “Something? What did you see?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was looking through the window and saw something in the trees. I thought it was a dead old stump until it moved, and I called the children inside. I didn’t see it again after that. You said Plut was not… like this, or as badly mauled?”

“He was not,” said Dameron, checking his pocket-watch. “I mean, he was able to be identified on sight, that is. Huxley, stay with old Mrs. Solo. Will you come with me, ma’am, to the super’s house? Michael, see if you can find a sack to put poor John into— get a man or two to help you. I will be back shortly.”

“I’ll come along,” said Rey, smoothing down her nightgown automatically. “Won’t we look a sight?”

“He won’t stand on ceremony,” said Dameron, walking with her to the road. “And if two walk together, that panther won’t attack again.”

They walked in silence, Dameron holding the lantern. Rey had spent most of her life regarding the doctor with suspicion, as most of the younger children had done. He had been near to nineteen when she had gone into the care of Mrs. Solo, and now was almost thirty, and he had been educated in a city somewhere far beyond the ridge of the mountains— Boston, perhaps, or New York, places that to Rey seemed as far away and magical as Fairy-land. Since Ben’s death, however, he had been kind to her, and she had warmed to him some. An avowed bachelor, he lived in the fine house on the hill with the office attached to practice out of, and he spent most of his days bandaging burns, stitching wounds, and handling broken arms and legs— there was no shortage of accidents in a coal town. 

“You have a remarkably fine constitution for a woman your age,” he said abruptly. “I expected you to faint at that sight.”

“Huxley almost did,” said Rey, holding her head high. “I was more frightened when the creature looked into the window of the house.”

“The window? It looked into the house?”

“Yes, sir,” said Rey, shivering to remember it. “It was so dark that I could not make out the size or color or even shape, but it stood a moment before the broken glass, and then left. It must be a panther the size of which has never been seen before, for if its head was tall enough on all fours to reach the window…”

“Well,” said Dameron, “they do say once animals far larger and wilder roamed these mountains long ago— before even the Choctaw were here. Perhaps some have remained, passing down their fearsome size.  _ Felix atrox.” _

“‘Cruel panther’, isn't it, in the Latin?” asked Rey. 

His eyebrows raised up. “Ah. You studied well. Yes. American lions, eight feet long and four feet tall at the shoulder.”

“I shouldn’t like to meet one on the road,” said Rey, her belly skittering about unpleasantly. 

“No, nor I,” Dameron told her, and showed her his Colt revolver, strapped to his belt. She felt better. “When did you learn your Latin?”

“At school. Mother Solo taught me.”

“Any Greek?”

“Some. Why?”

“Well, you have a fine stomach for dreadful sights, and knowledge of Latin and Greek, and a steady hand. I have been considering taking on an apprentice for my practice, as lately I seem to be inundated with the hurt and wounded. I don’t suppose you might be interested in physician’s work?”

“A physician?” She almost laughed aloud. “You are teasing me, sir. I am a woman. Women cannot be physicians.”

“Of course they can. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell was a teacher, like you, before she attended medical school fifty years back.”

“You forget, sir, that she was British, and what’s more, had money to pursue her education,” said Rey, shaking her head. “I have nothing at all, only company scrip and a stomach of iron. But you are kind to flatter me so.”

“Well, you might think on it,” he said, and they walked on in silence together.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for some mutilation and gore and period typical sexism and also a face slap!
> 
> for clarity's sake since we're narrowing down the gap: the flashback scenes with Ben and Rey take place in February of 1913. He dies in May of that year and the "present day" stuff takes place in November 1913. So sorry for the confusion.

**1913**

“Rey? Rey, come quick!”

She darted from the house. The February morning was bitingly cold and damp, and Kaydella Connicht, who hardly ever left her yard, was shouting in the street for her. “What is it? What?” cried Rey, jamming her arms into her coat and forgetting her hat. 

“Your man: he was hurt in the mine—”

Rey ran down and past her so quickly that she almost bowled the poor woman over, but Kaydella soon overtook her, running along to the doctor’s office. Panic burst sharp and heavy in her breast as she ran: hurt? Ben, hurt? How? Was it bad? Would he die? 

A few men were waiting outside, miners with black hands and faces, and Rey shoved past them, gasping. Fog had clung to her hair and face, damp and cool. “Ben,” she gasped, and thrust a curtain aside, revealing her husband, covered in blood and coal dust, and more naked than she had ever seen him— but sitting up, alive, whole—and Doctor Dameron, holding a bloody rag. Behind her, poor Kaydella moaned and fell to the floor with a thump. Rey did not so much as blink as someone picked her up and carried her out for air. “What happened?” she asked, fists trembling.

Ben turned and looked at her. “I’m all right, catfish,” he said, the right side of his mouth quirking up in a smile. His crooked teeth were very white in that filthy face. The left side of his face was ragged and bloody. “Got a pickaxe to the cheek and chest by accident.”

“You’re fortunate not to have punctured your chest cavity,” said Dameron, wringing out the cloth in a basin and dipping it into a fresh one. “Be still. Had you no helmet?”

Ben looked down. “It cracked a week back. Nobody gave me a new one.”

“God,” swore Dameron under his breath. “Anything to save a penny. All right. Mrs. Solo, you ought to wait out in the—”

“I will not,” said Rey, advancing. “I want to help.”

“Well, then.” Dameron handed her the rag and bucket. “You wash him clean while I get the needle and thread. Ought to give him whiskey for the pain, but—”

“I won’t take it,” said Ben, very pale under the black dust as she washed his cheeks. “Uncle Luke would never let me hear the end of it. Temperance and all.  _ Christ.” _ She had touched a raw spot. 

“I’ll be quick,” she told him, and took his heavy, solid arms in hand, washing him clean as Dameron rinsed his hands and got the needle and thread prepared. “What are you doing with that?” she asked, watching Dameron soak the needle in liquid and wash his hands in the same stuff.

“Carbolic acid, an anti-septic, to keep from it getting infected,” he said, turning to Ben. “This will not be pleasant, I’m afraid.”

Her husband’s jaw clenched. “Do it,” he said tightly, and gripped Rey’s hand so hard she thought her bones might break as the doctor dabbed the liquid all over the open wound on his bare chest and face. After that was done, he lay down on the table, still clinging to Rey’s hand as Dameron began to stitch the deepest parts of the wound. 

“You should have seen my face,” Rey said, trying to keep his mind off the pain. “I thought you were dead. Poor Kaydella fell down in a faint when she saw you, and after we ran all the way here, too.”

He bared his teeth in a mockery of a smile. “Poor girl,” he rasped, shuddering as the needle pierced him. “I am sorry for it. Frightening you, I mean.”

“You could never frighten me,” she said, squeezing his hand tight. “Not even with such a fearsome scar as I’m sure you’ll have now.”

Dameron finished off the last of the stitches. “There,” he said, washing his hands clean of blood. “Take him home and see that he rests. I’ll send a boy to the superintendent and see that he’s given some leave. A week, at least. Paid, if I can make it so.”

Ben sat up stiffly in an effort not to burst the stitches. “I won’t accept charity,” he said faintly.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Rey, easing him off the table. “It’s what we’re owed. They ought to have given you a new helmet.”

“Your wife is right,” said Dameron, half-smiling. “Go home and rest, Mr. Solo.”

* * *

The super’s house was dark, but when Dameron knocked and pounded enough, the door opened, and there stood Superintendent Pryde in his nightshirt, holding a kerosene lamp. “What the devil is it?” he barked, then saw Rey. “Apologies, ma’am—”

“There’s been a man torn to pieces,” she said without preamble. 

“Torn to— what?” Pryde looked shocked.

Dameron sighed. “It’s as she says, sir. That catamount has struck again, it seems, and worse this time. John Bowers is dead.”

“Good God; all those children,” said Pryde. “I’ll make sure his wife gets enough to live on for a time.” Nobody said aloud what they all knew: that the Bowers family would have to go, Helen and children, so that a working man could take up the space they had been in. The mine came before all. Rey felt a pang of guilt, as she had been, at least, useful to the town— a teacher might stay, but a widowed mother of six with nothing to offer in the way of skills could not.  _ And besides, they let me have the little shanty, though I do not sleep there, _ she thought. A wail floated over the dark roofs and streets, a heartrending shriek that made Pryde start where he stood. “What is that?” he asked. “The catamount? Don’t they sound like a woman screaming?”

“No, sir,” said Rey wearily. “Mrs. Bowers has just been told, I think. Dameron, will you escort me back to my mother’s house? I must see that she is not too badly shaken.”

“I will,” he said, and exchanged a few more words with Pryde before walking away, back down the street. It was colder, and she wished she had on her woolen petticoat. “I hope they have cleared all the body away. There is hardly anything to bury. Poor soul.”

“Poor Helen, more like,” said Rey. “She will not be able to say her good-byes. Even I held Ben’s hand before—” and her throat stopped up. She could say no more. 

Dameron nodded as if he understood. “You are kinder than most would be in such a situation. He was threatening you.”

“I was not afraid of him,” she insisted. “He frightened Mother Solo, and I had a poker. I would have beaten him, not— not torn him limb from limb as he was. But I fear if I go to Helen, she will blame me. Perhaps she already does, but I cannot help that.”

“If she did not put the blame on you, she would put it on herself, and that, I think, she cannot do, for the children’s sake,” said Dameron.

“Then I guess I must carry that burden until she can,” Rey told him, and they continued on together down the dark street.

* * *

By the third day at home, Ben was restless and irritable. His hurt face and breast itched, he had nothing to do, and he was sharp with Rey over small things. When she dropped a spoon in the kitchen, he snarled like a dog, and she lost her temper entirely. 

“You have no right to behave like this!” she shouted, wielding the spoon like a sword as she charged him. “I am trying to nurse you back to health: I’ve been here all day and I’m doing the best I can, and you have not thanked me, nor said a polite word to me!”

“And do you think I don’t know that!” he shouted, the angry, black-stitched furrow in his face twisting. “Don’t you think it’s killing me that I cannot help my own wife? That I am laid up like some invalid? God above!” And Ben stormed toward her, heavy feet thudding on the floor.

She did not even think before she dashed the cold pitcher of water over his face. It checked him where he stood, spluttering, dripping wet and icy, and with a clatter the pitcher slipped from her fingers and crashed to the floor. “If you lay a hand on me in anger,” she said coldly, as he wiped water from his brow, “you’ll regret it, Ben Solo.”

“I wasn’t,” he muttered, flushed scarlet. “I— I don’t know what I was—”

There was a knock at the door, and Ben stumbled backward in surprise, but when Rey answered it, it was only Mother Solo, bringing by hot broth and bread and clucking over her son like a mother hen until she swept back out to hurry to the schoolhouse for lessons, and they stood awkwardly in the kitchen as the delicious smell of the soup filled the house. 

“You might as well sit and eat, if you can,” said Rey.

“I can’t. It pulls at the stitches,” said Ben, face pale and stern. “Dameron ought to have had a woman do the stitching. He is no good at it.”

That made her smile, but she remembered she was supposed to be cross with him and turned her back. “Then I have no choice but to bring you a bowl and feed it to you like an invalid.”

“Christ,” grumbled Ben, and sat down stiffly at the table.

He slept in the bed that night, and Rey slipped in beside him anyway, curling up along his broad, warm back.

* * *

Four weeks had gone by since Rey had wept and said good-bye to little May Ella Bowers, and now it was late October and the brilliant leaves had begun to fall down all dead and brown. Winter was on its way, and school continued as it ever had. 

By November first, Rey began to notice that people were whispering behind their hands in the street when she passed, regarding her with some fear or awe on their faces, but whatever for, she could not guess. The frost began to gather in the mornings, and she called on Dameron.

“Why are people treating me so in the street?” she asked plainly, bewildered.

“Has anyone said anything to you?” he asked.

“No, but they whisper and look odd, and I can’t know why. Have you heard anything?” A terrible thought entered her head. “Oh, Lord: do they think I was responsible for what happened to Bowers?”

“Not so much,” said Dameron, sighing. “You know there are superstitions rampant in towns like these: well. Someone said they thought you must have hexed Plut when he was cruel to you, and that was why he got killed by that panther. And then when Bowers threatened you and was killed on the spot by the thing, well— seemed to put the nail into it, in a manner of speaking.”

“You mean to tell me that they all think I am some witch who can command the actions of an enormous wildcat?” demanded Rey, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. “Heaven above. I am a good Christian. I go to church—”

“As if that has ever mattered,” Dameron said. “But your reputation is on the line, now, ma’am, and that ought to be looked after, else you find yourself run out on a rail.” Some shadow crossed his face, and Rey frowned to see it: did the doctor speak from personal experience? But what could ever be amiss with his own reputation? “Speak softly, and quarrel with nobody, for your own sake.”

So she tried: she was soft in word and deed, as kind as she could be, hardly even scolded children for making mistakes in school— but all to no avail. Children began to disappear from classes, and when she saw her old pupils on the street, their mothers crossed it to avoid her. 

“The way I see it,” she said to Mother Solo and Reverend Walker at tea one cold Sunday as they discussed the matter, “I shall have to close the school soon and take up Dameron on his offer of becoming a physician’s assistant.”

Mother Solo’s eyes widened, and she glanced at her brother as the reverend nearly choked on his tea. “The very idea,” he said, shocked. “You are a woman. Doctoring is not women’s work: it flies in the face of the laws of God. You would be exposed to all manner of depravity.”

“I have no other work I can do,” she said. “You do not understand. I am desperate, sir.”

“You might marry again,” said Walker, setting his teacup down. “None of the young men are to your liking?”

“My husband has been dead half a year, and I am exhorted to wed again: no, sir,” said Rey calmly. “I could not bear it.”

“You are young. The longer you wait, the harder it will be,” said Reverend Walker, steepling his fingers. “Leia… might I have a moment alone with the girl?” Mother Solo nodded and stood, patting Rey on the shoulder as she went, and Rey froze: oh, no, no. This could not be. Why on  _ earth _ —

“Sir, I really must—”

“Walk with me,” said the minister, and she had no choice but to walk out the door and down the street with him, into the bitterly cold November air. He did not give her his arm, which she was grateful for, as the entire time she walked with him the hair stood up on the back of her neck, as if she was being followed— or watched— as if danger was lurking close by. 

_ Please, dear Lord, let a hole open up and just swallow him whole. Or me. Please. _

They came to the cemetery, the quietest place in the Hollow, and Reverend Walker paused a moment, settling his hat on his head. “I know I am not a young man,” he said, and Rey’s belly dropped into her shoes. “I am not my nephew. And I know that the laws of men do not forbid wedding a widowed niece if there is no blood relation, nor do the laws of God, but I know the idea may be distasteful to you.” She could not even speak. He was the  _ minister,  _ well into his sixties, and perhaps he had been a handsome young boy once, but now was a gray-haired, craggy-faced man with a beard and piercing blue eyes who bellowed about hell and repentance. “I see this, Mrs. Solo, as an opportunity for you: my sister will be happy to call you sister, you will be protected from gossip and rumors as a minister’s wife, you will have a decent home…”

Her eyes fell on the cemetery. Was that a blot of strange green on the ground, far off? She ought to listen politely to the reverend, but she could not make herself do it. “Just a moment,” she said faintly, and began to walk into the graveyard, Luke following after and still speaking. 

“I would not press upon you your marital obligations— where are you going, Mrs. Solo?”

“Wait…” she whispered, eyes searching the grass. She had not been here since May, when they had put him in the ground. “Just…”

“...although of course after a time I would expect you to treat with me as any wife in any godly marriage—in all respects, you understand, but of course at first there would be no pressing—”

_ Oh, shut up, shut up, _ she thought wildly, looking around. Yes. There was the yew tree they had buried him by, and where the wooden marker had been, there was—

There was—

Her breath almost stopped. The mound of dirt, which ought to have been flat and grassy after six months of summer growth, had sunken down in the middle, two feet deep, and grass grew down in the hollow.  _ The penny, _ Rey thought, and fell to her knees, searching through the grass at the marker. Her nails cut through dirt, black crescents under them, and she scrabbled and scraped, heedless of the minister’s words as she looked for the penny she had left at his grave. 

“Mrs. Solo, you are— are you not in your right mind?” he asked.

“It’s gone,” she said, looking all around. “It’s gone. The penny, the penny I left—”

“Perhaps I have made my proposal too soon,” said Reverend Walker, sounding vaguely perturbed. “You are ill. The sight of the cemetery has made you hysterical. Come along. We can go back to the house.”

“You don’t understand!” she shouted, raising her head up. “It’s gone, it’s  _ gone _ , not even buried in the earth like it might be, just gone! I left it here for  _ him _ !”

Reverend Walker looked entirely lost. “Well, I am sure it— perhaps someone stole it. You know children play here often.”

“No, no, no,” said Rey, tears spilling out of her eyes. “If they took it, they—it was, it was the last thing I ever gave him, a penny, a penny because it was the f-first thing he ever gave  _ me. _ And someone, can’t, who would have stolen it?  _ Who _ ?” 

“Get up,” he said brusquely, raising her up by her arm with some force. “I cannot abide hysteria in women. The doctor would say you needed brandy; all you need is a good hard smack to knock some sense into you. Get up!”

“If you lay a hand on me, sir, it will be the last time you lay a hand on anything in your life!” she screamed, loud enough to make the birds fly chattering from the trees above. “Let me go!”

The minister drew his right hand back and slapped her sharply across the face, so hard that her ears rang and she stumbled sideways. “There,” she heard him say smugly, as if from far off. “Now you are in your right mind: you see how simple that w—”

Something huge struck her, knocking the air from her lungs and her body to the ground knees over shoulders and fetching her up some distance away, leaves and bracken kicking up into her eyes and face as she heard Walker let out a roar of terror and agony. Frantic, she clawed at her face, trying to clear the bracken from her eyes as a  _ crack _ and a horrid rending sound met her ears, then a gurgling shriek from the minister before all was quiet save for low, agonized moans. 

Rey sat up, frantic, and saw Reverend Walker clutching his right hand— no, his right sleeve: the hand was gone, and blood burst out of the empty sleeve, staining his clothing. His mouth was open, too, his eyes wild, and he let out an inarticulate cry, letting Rey see that he had no tongue: it had been severed by something at the root and his mouth was drooling blood. “Reverend!” she cried, forgetting that he had struck her and rushing to his side. “Reverend, raise your arm high: we must stop the blood, and I’ll get you to Dameron as soon as can be. Stand up! Up! What was it? What did it?”

But he could not speak, only moan horribly as she slung his arm over her shoulder and walked step by tortuous step out of the graveyard and to the road.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cw for implied cannibalism in this one!

Dameron cauterized the stump and bandaged it well, and Leia sat by Rey as her brother writhed and moaned, but shook his head to refuse whiskey, and lay in a fitful sleep after it was all over while Rey recounted the events that had led to the tragedy. “He could not tell me what it was, of course,” said Rey, trembling. “But something, something enormous struck me, and knocked me ten feet off. It was all so fast, I did not see what it was.”

Mother Leia patted her hand. “I am grateful you are both alive, and that you were quick and got him here so fast.”

“We’ll need a new preacher,” said Rey dismally. “What sort of animal takes the tongue of a living thing and doesn’t kill it, or only attacks one where two walk together?”

“Bears?” suggested Dameron, sleeves rolled up as he doused the hissing hot iron. “Or a clever bear, perhaps.”

“I didn’t feel hair,” said Rey, trying to remember. Had she? She could not remember. “At least, I don’t think I did.”

“We might be able to ask him to write with his left hand what did it,” said Leia. “Though it may take him time: he was right-handed, of course. Mercy.” She rubbed her temples, looking older than ever with grief. “I hate to say it, child, but I think I understand why it seems to the townsfolk as though you are the cause of the trouble with this creature. If only my fool brother had not struck you…”

Horror dawned on Rey. “Mother, I said… I said…” She bit her lip. “Oh, Lord. Before he hit me, he threatened to do it, and I said— I said if he did, it would be the last time he laid a hand on anything. And then— and then it  _ was _ . He lost his hand. Why, I must have spoke it into being. Have I truly hexed myself? Or been hexed? Is there such a thing?”

Dr. Dameron shook his head. “Folklore and superstition, that’s all. And coincidence.”

“You ought to sit out in the hall for some air,” said Mother Leia, patting her hand.

“Yes,” said Rey faintly, standing. “I shall.” She let her feet take her to the hall outside the room where Dameron did his surgeries, and sat, exhausted, on a bench. It was cold, and she drew her shawl about her shoulders tightly. Likely, the frost was already gathering out in the twilight as the sun sank below the mountains. 

She sat there for a time, and must have nodded off, because suddenly she was jerking awake to the sound of her name being whispered, soft and urgent. 

_ Rey.  _

“What?” she murmured, rubbing her eyes, thinking Dameron had come out to whisper her awake.

The hall was empty. The hair on the back of her neck stood up. 

_ Rey.  _

Rey got to her feet, sure of herself: she had certainly heard that, awake and sober as a judge. “Who’s there?” she said aloud, shivering. “What do you want?”

Silence. Nothing. She drew to the door and opened it wide, looking out into the cold, dim street.  _ I must go home _ . Her feet began to carry her as if they knew where to go, and she let them do it, all the way back to the row where the shanty stood that she had shared with Ben.

_ My house. Home. My home. _

She stepped up on the porch of their house, hands shaking, and opened the door, lighting the lamp. It was coated in dust inside, and out of habit, she picked up a cloth, shaking it out and wiping off the table, the chairs, the stove.  _ If I stay in the light, nothing can get me, _ she thought, taking the lamp with her as she moved. The flame trembled. It was her hand, shaking.

What was she waiting for, here in the dim house where all the dishes had been cleared away, the air cold and stale, the towel hanging stiff on the bone-dry basin? Rey did not know. Her mind was somewhere far from here. She put the lamp down and sat in the chair, waiting. 

_ Thump. Thump. Thump-thump.  _

Two steps up, a quick double step to knock the dust off the boots. 

Someone was outside her door. 

She could not breathe. _I am mad. I have gone mad. Rey_ sat, terror clutching her throat like a living thing, as the latch was tried from outside, jiggled, lifted slowly… and the door was pushed inward, swinging open. The lamp flickered, casting up shadows like devils dancing in Hell. 

A dark silhouette against the night stood on her threshold, unmoving as stone: broad shoulders, long hair. 

“Rey,” whispered a voice she knew, knew, _knew_ : deep, solemn, but dry and rasping.

“No,” she said, shaking so violently she thought she might be sick. “You can’t be here.”

“But… this is our house,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

“Why’re you here?” she whispered, shaking. “Are you a ghost? Am I dreaming?”

He stepped over the doorway and into the light, shutting the door behind him, and she saw—

Ben. 

_ Ben.  _

His hair was matted with dirt, and he wore what they had buried him in: his Sunday best, now stained and rumpled as if he had gone about in it for months without washing. His lips were dry and cracked, and there was no color in his sallow, waxen skin, and the right side of his head was…

_ Dynamite. Went off too soon. Poor soul probably still doesn’t know he’s dead.  _

The skin looked as if it had been burnt, rough and thick in shiny pink patches from scalp to neck, but not misshapen— as if it had healed up somehow, but that, that was not possible: dead men did not heal. 

“But you’re dead,” she said, her breath hitching. “You’re dead, you’ve been dead these six months.”

“I know,” he said simply. There was something in his hand, but Rey could not see it. “Something’s... wrong with me.”

“Yes, you damn fool!” Rey exploded, disbelieving. “You’re dead, that’s what’s wrong with you, and yet here you are in the kitchen, in, in— what do you have there?”

“This,” Ben said, unfolding his hand and showing her the thing. It was a penny, the penny she’d left on his grave, and her eyes filled up with tears as she looked at it. “It was left for me, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was for you,” she said, half-weeping as her hands trembled. “You can’t be here. You ain’t real. You can’t be. Oh, God, I’ve gone off my rocker.”

“I’m as real as you are,” he said, and looked at her hands. “Oh. You have my ring. I wondered where it had got to.”

“I, I, I thought it ought to go back to your mama, but she said I should keep it,” she blubbered, willing herself to keep her eyes open, lest she blink and he disappear. What if she wasn't mad, and he had come here, crawled out of his grave, to kill her for stealing the ring? “I'm sorry I took it, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Ben, please don’t h-hurt me—”

“Hurt you?” he echoed, lost as he took another step toward her. “No. I’m… I’m supposed to help you. I promised Mama I’d take care of you all your life, didn’t I? And I promised you, on the day we wed. I’d… take care of you, always. I been trying, all this time. I think I have, anyway. I don’t think I’m doing it right.”

Ben sounded so pitiable that Rey willed herself to open her eyes. “What d'you mean, you been trying?” she asked, alert with horror. He did not look at her. “Ben, tell me. What do you mean by that?”

“They were… trying to hurt you,” he whispered, opening and closing his fist. His eyes looked distant. “All of them. I… I didn’t mean to make it so bad for you. And now you’re worse off than before. It’s my fault. That’s the curse. I came back all wrong.”

“What curse? You’re making no sense.” It was impossible for her to sit here, she thought wildly, and speak to her dead husband who was standing in her kitchen, but she was anyway.  _ They were trying to hurt you.  _ Her mind spun. Had Ben killed Plut? Bowers? Mutilated his own uncle? For  _ her?  _ Impossible. It must be some dream, caused by her grief, the troubles she’d had: everyone knew women grieving were prone to fits and such. 

“The man,” said Ben softly. “The man in all black, dressed like a coal baron. He said he might be able to buy me some more time if I gave him a little somethin’, so I did.”

_ “What _ man in black?” demanded Rey.

“The Devil,” said Ben. “At least, I’m sure he was, but he wasn’t the right kind of Devil— not how Uncle Luke always said, Lucifer, beautiful as an angel and brighter than the morning star. I think maybe there’s one devil in the Bible and another in the woods outside Walker’s Hollow.”

Rey’s blood ran cold. “What did you give him?”

“A piece of my soul,” said Ben, looking like he might faint. “And now I can’t—that was the trick he done me, I guess. I can’t feel nothin’. He just… took all my feelings out. I don’t feel happy, or sad, or scared. I’m just thirsty, and wandering.”

“How in God’s name did you get to the woods after bein’ buried?” asked Rey. There was no water in the house, and she could not leave him here to get to the pump: he might disappear, and even if he was only a vision, or a fragment of her crazed imagination, she couldn’t bring herself to look away for a moment.

“It wasn’t like that,” he answered. “I… let me see if I can recall. I was in the mine, had done my day, and next thing I knew the whistle was blowin’, and I was coming home. I sat down, and you were there— you set my dinner out for me and scolded me for leaving my lunch pail behind, and before I could speak a word I was… somewhere else.”

Rey clutched her arms and her knees buckled. She slid to the ground in horror. “Where else?” she croaked.

Ben shrugged. “It was just nothing. Dark. I wasn’t scared. It was like sleeping. And that was when the man came, all in black, and said if I felt I had some unfinished business, well, wasn’t he just the man for the job. It felt like I was in the woods, but it wasn’t the woods. I couldn’t see nothing clearly. So I gave him the part of my soul he wanted. Felt like a butcher handing over a choice cut to a picky old missus: here’s the tender bit, the choice bit. Anyway, he took it.” A cough wracked Ben’s throat. “You don’t have no water?”

“I’ll, I’ll—” Rey got up. “You stay right here. Don’t disappear.”

“No, ma’am,” he said softly, and she grabbed the bucket, raced to the well outside, and pumped it as full of icy water as she could before dragging it back in for him. 

He had not moved, but remained where he was, standing in the kitchen. She ladled him a cup and handed it to him, and he gulped at the water like a man dying of thirst. She noted he was careful not to touch her skin. “Can you not touch me?” she asked.

“Something like that,” he said. 

Well, he might be a dream, but someone had to answer for the deaths. “You say you killed Bowers,” said Rey, and watched his eyes drop. “And Plut. And you tore out your own uncle’s tongue with his right hand: he can’t preach no more or write. You don’t feel sorry about that?”

“I wish I did,” said Ben. “I don’t feel nothing. Not sorry, or angry, or nothing. I know I loved you, and I know you’re my wife, but I can’t feel none of the affections I know I had for you, or for Mama, or anybody.”

“Why in the  _ hell _ did you think sellin’ your soul to, to—” Rey could not breathe for fury and grief. “You damned fool, what have you done? Everyone knows you got to hold onto your soul no matter what! How are you supposed to get to Heaven now?”

“I don’t think there’s any Heaven, Rey,” he said. “Just… nothing. I didn’t see nothing at all, or hear nothing, like I told you. And once he took the part he wanted, I woke up under the ground in that box.” A shudder wracked him. “Crawled out. Took me a whole night.”

“But your  _ soul, _ ” said Rey, tears drenching her cheeks.  _ It’s not real, he can’t be real. My real husband is safe away in Heaven with the angels and this is… this is... _

“It was all I had, and he wouldn’t take the penny,” said Ben. “And it was only a bit. I still think, don’t I? And, and talk. I got reasoning. I ain’t an animal.”

“Certain sure?” she demanded. “Because what you did to Plut and Bowers and the minister—oh, Christ, if this is true, then there’s been no catamount or panther at all, only you.”

“Yes,” he said plainly. “And you been afraid of it all this time. You shouldn’t have been. It was just me. I got to take care of you. Make you safe. You weren’t in danger.”

“You were at the schoolhouse,” she whispered, trembling all over. “Watching me. Weren’t you? Or was that— something else?”

His eyes dropped. “I wanted to see you. Just to make sure you was all right. I tried a few times, but it wasn’t safe. Nobody else’d understand if they saw me. You know.”

She collapsed to the floor on weak knees, and Ben made a sound in his throat like a hoarse groan, stumbling forward to her with hands outstretched. “Don’t touch me,” she begged, shaking. “No, don’t. I’m— I can handle myself all right.” Her husband: come home at last, grave-dirt on his clothes, dead but alive.  _ Think of something, find answers, _ said her teacher’s mind.  _ You may be mad, but try to find out something anyway.  _ Rey got to her feet and into a chair, and Ben sat, too, easing himself down like he’d maybe forgot how to use one. “You’re breathing,” she said. “Ain’t you?”

“I am,” he said. 

“So you… you can die again, or not?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Ain’t happened yet, though.”

“Have you a heartbeat?”

He shook his dirty head. “No. It’s awful quiet in my body.”

“Might I… feel for a pulse?” she asked, fingers twined so tightly in her lap she was afraid they might turn black. She hoped he’d say no, so she wouldn’t have to touch him, and she could tell herself it was all a dream. 

“You may,” he said after a moment, and held out his arm to her. Rey could do nothing else, then, but stretch out her hand and lay her fingers upon the inside of his wrist. He felt cold, inert and nerveless as the dead hand she had held under its shroud of canvas, and there was no pulse that she could feel.  _ Not a dream, then. _ But didn’t she touch things, sometimes, in dreams that felt real at the time? Was this what being mad was like: not knowing truth from fantasy?

Ben made a low sound in his throat as she slid her fingers along his cold skin, and she remembered that he had said touching her was unpleasant. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said, withdrawing her hand. 

He seemed to have trouble finding words. “It don’t hurt so much as give me a funny ache in my belly,” he said. “It feels like… like being on the outside of a warm house in the deep snow, looking through the window at the hot stove and the fire inside that you can’t get to.”

“But you can get to me,” she whispered, pitying him, specter of her imagination or no. “I’m here.”

“Not in a way I could have done, being alive,” he replied. “It ain’t the same.”

Rey tried to pull herself together. “Well,” she said. “Well. Where have you been staying?”

“I’ve been in the woods,” he told her. 

“Do you sleep?”

“No. I don’t think I need to.”

“Do you… eat?”

He looked uncomfortable and shifted his weight. “No.”

She decided not to press that. “Well, if you’re real, you can’t stay here in the daylight. The neighbors’ll see.”

“I shouldn’t be around you in the daylight,” he corrected. “It’ll be easier for you if I only come and see you in the dark. If you… want me to.”

_ Did _ she want him to? Rey stood on weak knees and circled the table, approaching him. He regarded her with some wariness, but did not move. “You’re truly Ben?” she asked. “My Ben?”

Ben cracked a dry, half smile. “You tell me, catfish mouth.”

Unexpected emotion bubbled in her throat, and she pressed her palm against the unburnt side of his face. The chill of his dead flesh could be ignored, the waxy cast to his face, the pallor: he was solid, and real, and sitting here in their kitchen. “Oh, God,” she whispered, tears flowing, and it didn’t matter for a moment that he wasn’t truly living— this was her husband, dead and buried and come home again. “If I am mad, or dreaming, then I hope I never become sane or wake.”

“Don’t cry,” he said softly, staring up at her with clouded, tired eyes. “You’re rippin’ my heart out, Rey. I can’t feel nothing, but I know I should.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she cried, tearing her hand away. “I ought to be terrified for my life and my state of mind, seeing my dead husband come through the door and knowin’ he killed two men and maimed a third, maimed his own uncle—would you kill your own mother, too, if she said a cross word or raised a hand to me?”

Something like pain crossed Ben’s face. “Mama,” he said, as if trying to recall his mother’s face, and he sounded pitiful, a sad and broken thing, croaking. “No. Not if you… told me not to.”

Rey had never felt more exhausted. “It’s late,” she said, forcing herself to stop blubbering like a great big child. “I want to sleep. I have had a devil of a day.”

“I understand,” he said, ducking his head, and the gesture was so like Ben that she wanted to weep again. “I— do you want me to stay here ‘till the sun’s up? Or shall I go?”

She could not bear the thought of him in the house. She could not bear that he might be nothing but a dream and go. “Stay here in the kitchen,” she said. “Just sit a spell, and, and drink all the water you want.”

* * *

Rey could not sleep despite the bone-deep tiredness that crawled up on her like an unwanted suitor.  _ What if he’s gone? _ She lay awake, wondering if he had vanished like a haint, or still remained unmoving at the table. The night dragged on, and she slipped from her bed, wrapping her shawl around her shoulders as the eastern sky began to turn gray.

_ I’ll just peek out, _ she told herself.  _ Just look. Just a moment.  _

She twitched the curtain aside, peering out with one eye into the dark kitchen. Soft noises, like sucking, met her ears, and she inched out further, curiosity overcoming her fear. What was that? 

Ben sat at the table, his shoulders hunched, his hands coming up to his mouth. He was chewing at, or sucking at, something in his hands… something that left dark stains across his cheeks, his dead mouth, his nose. Rey must have made a noise, because he looked up and saw her, and in the pale, wan light, the lower half of his face was black with what she recognized now as blood.

Rey’s gorge rose, and she burst past the curtain, ignoring the moan of “Rey” that drifted past her ears, the squeak of the table being shifted—running out into the bitterly cold, damp November morning, away from this ghostly shell of a home and all the way back to Dameron’s home with its safe promise of light and warmth.

* * *

_ Mad, mad, I must be going mad. _

* * *

Half-frozen with cold, she was wrapped in a blanket and shawl and left on a fine sofa with a hot drink close to hand as Dameron sent someone to fetch Leia. Luke was still recovering in the infirmary, under Dameron’s supervision. It only seemed a matter of moments to Rey before Mother Leia was sweeping in, mostly-dressed save for her hair, and sitting at her side. 

“Rey, dear,” she began softly, and Rey could not hear her voice without thinking of her son, who had said the only thing keeping him from taking his mother’s life was her own words. She began to cry. Leia took her hand gently. “You did not come home last night,” she said, the question lingering unspoken in the edges of her words.

“I went home,” Rey explained, sniffling something awful. “I went… back to, to—” She could not say it, could not speak his name, but Mother Leia understood.

“And you gave yourself a fright, is that it?”

_ No, _ Rey wanted to say.  _ No, your son was there: he was waiting for me and he is back from the grave, all burnt, and he sold all the good things in his soul to come back and kill whoever does me wrong, and I think he’s eating raw flesh at my kitchen table: it is either that or I am off my head.  _ “Yes,” she said instead, feeling sick.

“You oughtn’t to have gone back there,” said Leia softly. “Perhaps we ought to tell the super that you have moved all your things and wish it to go to a new family.”

Rey stiffened. A new family: that would not do, for she had told him he could stay there nights, and what if he walked in on some strange family he did not know, and then— “No!” she almost shouted, jerking upright. “No, I don’t— not yet. I just need time.”  _ Time to work out what is the matter with me, at least. _

“More time than six months?” said Mother Solo. 

“Often,” said Dameron very carefully, and Rey started: she had not known he was there, “some great tragedy can take one person a matter of weeks to recover from, while it takes another years, and these things ought not to be rushed, for the sake of harming the fragile mind.”

_ Fragile mind? _ Rey was indignant, but she caught the look on the doctor’s face: he understood her, and was nodding, eyebrows raised, as Leia looked away to consider. “You ought to take a small leave of absence from teaching, then,” she said. “I can easily take up with your students for a time.”

Part of Rey demanded to refuse, to insist upon being useful. The other part, the quieter, creeping part, said,  _ time alone to think, and go back… _ but why would she want to go back, to see that thing at her table gnawing on gore? She did not know. Perhaps Dameron was right: some time to herself would ease the strange symptoms of her clearly troubled mind, and she would be rested and sane again. “All right,” she heard herself say, and closed her eyes. Somewhere, Dameron was saying she should sleep, and she slowly drifted off as the bright sun rose.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another mention of cannibalism in this one! 
> 
> SPOOKY SCARY OOOO

She knew she could not run away from it forever. No, she must go and face her terror head-on, and gain answers, like a proper educator should. Rey sat down, dressed properly at last in skirt and shirtwaist and coat and shawl about dinner-time, and wrote a letter detailing what was to be done with her small effects in the event of her death, then put it in an envelope and hid it in Mother Leia’s house under her meager drawer of Sunday clothes. Someone would find it later and read it, should she not return. Luke was recuperating, though poorly and still under Dameron’s supervision, and she helped Leia make good hearty broth for him to take.

After she kissed Leia good-bye and said she was going for a walk, she left the house. Back down the row she went, her heart beating madly but her mind sure and resolved.  _ I must find him. I must. I must discover whether it is a dream or not: whether I am mad. _

Up the steps of the shanty house she went, opening the door. It had been left unlocked, but as she entered, mouth gone dry, she realized it was empty, the sunset light streaming through the curtains and lighting on nothing at all. The table where he had sat was clean, and the only sign anyone had been there was the chair, moved back a few feet. 

Rey lit the lamp, sat in the other chair, and waited. He would come, wouldn't he? “Ben,” she said aloud, trying to quiet her frantic mind. “Ben, I am here. I’m waiting. Come along in.” How silly: he could not hear her now. She sat quietly and waited, wondering what fresh horror her fevered mind would impose upon her senses.

The sun faded from the sky, and it was not until night fell in its entirety, heavy and black, that Rey heard the familiar steps outside, and the door opening, and there he stood, still in filthy clothes, but with a cleaner face than he had had the last time she had seen him. She felt a stir of surprise and joy within her breast at the sight of him, quickly overtaken by unsure fear, and decided not to press upon him to explain his last actions. He was dead, after all, and she was likely imagining the entire affair.

“Evening,” Ben said roughly, as if he was not sure if he was truly welcome.

“You— you can sit,” she said, pointing at the chair. Ben crossed over and sat, easing his heavy body into the seat. For lack of anything to say, she asked, “How was your day?”

“I been hunting,” he answered, avoiding looking at her. “You went to the doctor’s house.”

“Yes. You frightened me.” She swallowed and clasped her hands under the table. 

“I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry for it.”

“Might I ask what you were… hunting?” she prompted, steeling herself for the worst.

Ben shifted in his seat. “I get a… hankering,” he said. “For, for— blood, I think, and meat. Marrow, maybe. It’s like trying to touch life again, I guess. But it ain’t like eating food. I don’t eat it three times a day, I mean. It only crops up when I’m near to you.”

She forced her gorge down, swallowing. “I make you want to eat a mess of gore?” she asked, voice trembling. 

“I don’t know, rightly,” he said. “Remember when I said that, about looking in a window where there’s something you can’t get to? It’s like… if I did that, looking at good hot food inside, and then went to the refuse heap tryin’ to find something to eat to sate it.”

Rey suddenly remembered that they had never found the minister’s severed hand. She pushed that thought far away from her mind just as she swallowed down her rising gorge. “Do you feel it now, sitting here with me?”

“Yes,” he said softly, eyes pinned to her face. “But I don’t want to…  _ eat _ you, Rey. Or hurt you. I can’t do that. It ain’t quite hunger. I don’t know what it is.”

“So when you say hunting…”

“Small things,” he said quickly, as if to reassure her. “Squirrels. Rabbits and such. They’re easy, and I’m a lot quicker than I used to be. Stronger, too.”

“I got to know,” Rey said, dropping her mannerly speech and standing up from the table to pace about. “I got to know if you’re, you know— putrefying on the inside or somethin’. Because winter’s comin’ and maybe you won’t stink as bad in the cold, but come spring— I mean, who knows how long this’ll be goin’ on for? Assumin’ of course, that you’re real, and not a figment of my mind.”

“Oh. No, I don’t think I am,” he said, patting his chest and looking down as if he could see past his own sternum. “Nothing’s fell off so far, and I ain’t turning black anywhere that I can see, and it’s been six months of summer since I crawled out. I did get sick, though, when I came up. Grave-mud and worms and creepy-crawlies. But I haven’t seen no more of them since. You’ll tell me if I do start putrefying?”

“I will,” said Rey quickly. That was something she could add to the list of things she knew about this haint, her imagination or no: a body that didn’t rot, dead but alive, strong and quick, but unable to feel sadness or grief or love or anger. “Does water— you said beforehand you were thirsty. Did the water help that?”

“Some. I think it’s just ‘cause I’m dry in the throat, you know. Ain’t much lubrication when you’re dead. No spit.” He cracked a half-smile, and Rey answered it with a slight one of her own. “My eyes are burning and I have trouble moving ‘em and such, too, and seein', I think.”

“Oh. I’ll wet them for you, then,” she told him, and pinched a little salt into a cup of water, then lit the stove. He watched the fire with hungry eyes, unmoving at the table, until the water had boiled. “Dameron showed me how to do it,” she told him as she worked, setting the pan on the window-sill to cool. “Said there was nothin’ better than a little bit of salt in water for dry eyes and a sore throat. Here. Tilt your head on back.”

He did, his clouded eyes staring up, and Rey dipped a clean finger into the water, letting it drop down off her finger-tip into his eye. It was warm, but not hot, and he let out a soft sound as the water flowed, lashes fluttering as the drop coated his eye and dripped down his face. “Ah, that’s— good,” he said, blinking. “Do th’ other one.”

“Hold on,” she said, and wetted her finger again, dripping into the other eye. “There. Better?”

He lifted his head and looked around, water streaking down his cheeks like tears. “Oh,” he said, looking up at her. “You’re so clear now. Before you were just… a shape, like a shadow. A ghost.”

“Well, here I am,” she said lightly, and poured some of the saline into a jar, screwing the lid on tight. “There. You use this when you need some extra lubrication. Did the water you drank, did it just—” She turned a little pink, unsure of how to ask about basic bodily needs, but curious. “Did it go through you?”

“Well,” he said, looking down. “It sorta… went in and came out the same way. I don’t hear the call of nature anymore. Same with all the… stuff I been trying to eat. I eat it, but it can’t go no further than my belly, and just comes back up. You don’t need to see that, though.” He coughed, dry and wracking.

“Your throat still dry?” Rey poured the rest of the water into a cup. “You gargle that and spit it out.”

He took the cup and did so, spitting into the basin, then cleared his throat and turned to her. “Mighty less dry. Thank you kindly,” he said, and his voice sounded much better, so like the old Ben she’d known that it almost brought tears to her eyes.

“Do you want your ring back?” she asked, turning away and pretending to fiddle with the towels so he wouldn’t see her cry. “I forgot to ask.”

“No. You can keep it. I ain’t a true husband anyway, not anymore.” 

“That’s not what your vows said,” she told him. “Till death us do part, remember? And death hasn’t parted you from me yet, it seems.”

Ben sat back down. “I can’t provide for you no more like I said I would. I can’t do anything but kill. I’m… not really me, am I? Just some monster.”

“You’re not a monster,” Rey said sharply. “You’re just— sick. Something’s just gone wrong. You’ll—” She almost said  _ get better,  _ but in this case, getting better, whether she did or he did, would mean being truly, really dead, and she realized she did not want that, not at all. Even this shade of her husband would be better than that. “We’ll find a way,” she said instead.  _ I will just pretend, _ she told herself.  _ Pretend it’s true. _

“Ain’t no way,” he told her softly. “The man in black said once I was done with what I came to finish, I would have to get you to run an iron nail through my heart, and then I’d be truly dead and buried and the debt would be paid.”

Rey’s mouth fell open. “Me? Why me?”

“Because you’re the one I came back for,” he said, as if it was the simplest answer in the world. “Maybe it’d be a kindness. This ain’t what I wanted.”

“I can’t run no iron nail through your damn heart,” she burst out, shocked. “I’d, I’d be killing you all over again, and it would be on  _ me, _ my fault— why in the hell didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”

“Thought it’d upset you,” he said, looking down. 

“Upset me? I can’t kill my own husband! Even if you are dead already— but you ain’t, you can't be dead, because I'm mad but anyhow dead men don’t walk and talk and, and—” Rey felt tears streak down her cheeks, hot and salt. “Oh, you  _ idiot, _ this is what you get for trusting the damn Devil, and now we’re both all tangled up in it. How am I supposed to let you go again?”

“Don’t,” Ben whispered, stumbling out of his seat and kneeling at her feet as she sobbed. “Don’t, Rey. You’re tearin’ me up.” His fingers clutched at his own arms, the dirt-caked nails digging into the cold flesh beneath the soiled shirt. “Tell me,” he begged, eyes cast up in desperation. “Tell me how to make it stop hurtin’ you. I got to keep you safe. Happy. I can’t bear it.”

“Stop,” she sobbed, tugging at his hands, pulling them away from his arms. “Stop, don’t. Oh, Ben. It ain’t fair. I hardly got a married life with you at all.”

He looked as if he didn’t understand. “What do you mean? We were married for a year, weren’t we?”

“I mean,” Rey stammered, “I mean, there wasn’t no time for just us, not enough. I was studying to be a teacher and you were always working and, and—I don’t know. Maybe that is married life anyway. But I wanted, I wanted things I didn’t know how to ask for, and I think maybe you did too, and now we don’t have no chance at fixing any of it.”

“Maybe we do,” he said. “Maybe I can… stay like this. Here. With you. The neighbors don’t have to see nothing. But I can’t be a true husband to you. You know that.”

“You mean… because you can’t work? You don’t need to, I can do enough—”

“I mean,” he said, very stiffly, “in the way of... marital things.”

Rey had not considered that. “Oh,” she said, turning scarlet. “You mean you can’t… it doesn’t…” 

Ben seemed transfixed by the flush to her cheeks. “No, it doesn’t,” he said. “I don’t... have no movin’ blood.”

“No,” said Rey softly, and reached forward, brushing the lank, dirty hair out of his face. “Well, never mind that, then. You need a hot bath, I think. You look a right mess.”

“That would be nice,” he said, closing his eyes against her touch.

_ Yes, _ she thought,  _ I can pretend he is real, and here with me for a while longer. _

* * *

After she’d boiled enough water and set the wooden tub up, Ben stripped down in the kitchen and set his clothes aside. She still had his old things, clean and put away, so she got out a soft, worn union suit and a pair of trousers, setting them on the table for when he was done. 

Looking at him wholly naked was strange. Rey could see, in the lamplight, that the rippling, scarred burns went from scalp to shoulder to breast to hip in a broad, shiny mass, but they did not seem to hurt him. His body, once pink-pale where the sun never touched, now bore a sickly blue cast, even in the golden lamplight, and his fingernails, once scrubbed clean, were a cold lavender color, same as the tip of his heavy, inert manhood, his lips, and his nipples. 

Rey got a stool and washed his hair for him with the fine-milled soap Leia had given her as a wedding present that she’d been too afraid to ever use, making sure to scrub every strand clear of filth and combing it through after, free of knots and tangles. He let her do it, shoulders hunched, and when she was done, he washed the rest of himself clean slowly, like he’d forgot how. 

“How’s the water?” she asked, pouring some over his shoulder to get rid of the suds.

“Good,” he answered. “Almost makes me believe I’m alive again.”

_ I could believe it, too, _ she wanted to say.  _ With my eyes shut, I could believe you here, with me again. _ His skin, warmed by the hot water, felt living and real and firm again. “We could pretend it’s Saturday night and we’re taking our baths for church in the morning,” she said softly.

“You used to come in and kiss me on the ear sometimes,” he remembered. “A peck for luck.”

“Like this.” Rey bent forward lightly and pressed her lips lightly to the curve of the pale ear poking out from under his wet hair, and Ben went stiff beneath her, jolting suddenly in the water. “Ben?”

“Nothin’,” he said, trembling a little. “I— I thought— nothing. It’s all right. Startled myself.”

“All right. Let’s get you out and dry and in warm clothes again.” Rey shook out his clothes as he rose from the bath and dried himself off, then handed the clothes to him, watching him wriggle into the close-fitting suit and the pants. “Better?” she asked.

He looked better. Much better, if a walking corpse could look better: his bluish mouth was damp, his eyes were bright, his hair was drying in damp locks. “More comfortable,” he said, examining his clean hands. “I don’t think my hands’ve ever been this clean in my life.”

“Well, you been free of coal dust for six months; that has something to do with it,” she said practically as she poured the dirty water out the window. “What do you want to do now?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Maybe just sit with you a spell. And look at you.”

“All right,” she said, and sat down at the table. “It doesn’t hurt you, being close like this?”

“It aches some. I just want to…” and he reached out his large, thick hand, warm from the bath, and touched her knuckle lightly, a single fingertip to her skin. 

It felt like lightning, some shocking thing that lit her body up. Rey froze in her seat as he lifted his hand away, half-shy of her, and sat back down at the table. “I want… I don’t understand what it is,” he said, half to himself. “Life, I guess. But I can’t… like I told you, it can’t get into me, like food does with eating. I can’t touch it. I can’t get to it at all, nor get it in me. God, but you’re warm.”

“You can touch me again,” she told him, dizzy with the prospect: would this product of her own imagination be able to touch her well enough to make her think it was real? “Go on.”

Ben reached out his hand, but he didn’t stroke her hand this time— he cupped her neck, fingers curling round the back of her head, his palm pressed against the pulse of her throat. His mouth fell open as he felt the blood rushing through her body in its even, rapid beat, and he half-fell from his chair, nearly toppling her out of hers in his effort to get closer. “Oh,” he breathed, half-in her lap, trembling as his hands tightened to feel her pulse. “It’s  _ hot _ .”

“You can feel it?” Rey whispered, half-frightened he’d choke her, but at the same time knowing he would never harm her, not even by accident, not as a dream, a nightmare, or in life. She yearned to draw him in close, to fold him into her body and be one with him so that he might be alive again, with hot blood running in his veins, and pink cheeks. Ben made a ragged little sound and buried his cool brow into the crook of her neck, and she went very still. He felt solid and real beneath her cheek: solid as anything else in the house.

“This is what I been wanting,” he whispered, his breath cool and dry on her throat. “Just to hold you so, and…” His nose traced her jugular vein, beneath the thin skin of her throat, and he moaned a little, shuddering. 

Rey brought her hand up and carded it through his hair, still damp and clean. “I’m here,” she whispered. “It doesn’t hurt you none?”

“It’s like, like—” Ben made another inarticulate sound. “It’s killing me, but I can’t tear myself away. Oh, God. I want, I want to be alive again.”

“I wish I could tell you that you would be,” said Rey, fighting to control her voice. She reached around and embraced him close, and he shivered lightly, his broad back wedged between her arms, his face crushed to her neck. “I might pretend like a child, but in the daylight…”

“Don’t tell me about the daylight,” Ben said, muffled in the crook of her neck. “It means you’ll have to go.”

“No, I can stay,” she said. “Your mama will teach in my stead. I’ll stay here a spell, with you. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” he whispered, his fingers working compulsively at the tender, warm skin of her jaw and neck. “I just got to be near you. That’s all I want.”

* * *

She undressed for bed in the warm kitchen while he waited, watching. Since she had not brought a nightgown, Rey left on her knickers and camisole, then wrapped her coat snugly around her shoulders and nodded at him. Her feet were chilled to the bone already, even in their woolen stockings. Now, there was only the question of whether or not he would stay out here in the kitchen while she slept in their bed. 

“I expect—” she began, unsure, and stopped herself in her own tracks as Ben’s eyes, silent and longing, met hers at once. He would follow her anywhere, she was sure of it, and she could not bring herself to force him to sit out here away from the tantalizing life within her very being that he craved so. “Come to bed,” she said quietly.

He jerked up at once and followed her to the bed, past the curtain, where she crawled under the quilt. Ben followed her in, shucking off his trousers. The bed sagged under his weight, and Rey closed her eyes, emotion welling up in her throat: how she had missed the solid presence of a man in her bed this past half a year! He was not warm, but he rolled over to face her, drawn by her heat. “This all right?” he whispered, cool on her cheek as his hand rested lightly on her wrist, where her pulse beat rapid and feverish beneath her living skin. 

“It is,” she said softly, tucking her head below his chin. “You can go on and take whatever liberties you like. You're my husband, ain't you?”

He sighed, as if content, and Rey fell away into a dreamless, gentle sleep. 


	7. Chapter 7

When she woke, he was not there, and daylight streamed in through the kitchen window, winter-pale and wan. She sat up, shivering, and saw that the stove had gone out, and that the tub was where she had left it last night. Rey slipped from her bed and padded to the table, throwing her thick coat on and stoking up the fire. The cold cut her like knives. “I'm completely mad,” she said aloud to the silent walls. “Entirely mad. To dream that my husband, dead six months, has crawled from his grave, come home, craves the life within me, and—”

There was a gentle knock on the door, and she went to it out of habit, opening it wide. Dr. Dameron stood on the step, his hat in his hand. “I beg your pardon for calling so early,” he said. “But I thought you ought to know. Your uncle-in-law has taken for the worse.”

“Oh, God,” said Rey in horror, forgetting her previous thoughts. “Is it infection?”

Dameron looked drawn. “I think so. The stump is inflamed and he is feverish. He would not allow me to use alcohol to clean the wound.”

“Oh, temperance, temperance!” Rey exclaimed. “That fool— let me dress, and I will be out at once— no, wait, you must come in. It is so cold outside, and I have just built the fire.”

“Thank you kindly,” said Dameron, and stepped in, warming himself as she hurried to throw on her clothes from the day before. “I must say, I am surprised to find you back here. I thought you would avoid the place, after the fright you took the night before last.” He was just visible past the crack of curtain.

Rey buttoned her shirtwaist and put on her petticoat. “Oh,” she said, feeling caught out. “Well. I— I suppose I have no explanation, then.”

“Well, there must be one,” he said. “I would be interested to hear it. You were most anxious to know if your late husband was truly dead when he was brought to me, and that is something I can say I have never heard from a grieving widow— most demand their men be alive.”

Rey’s throat felt very dry. “I can give no explanation,” she repeated, walking out wearing respectable clothing again, her shawl tucked round her head. “Let us go and visit my uncle— my poor mother Leia will need all the support we can provide.”

* * *

Luke lay like a graven image he would have preached against, laid out on the surgeon’s table, silent and gray in the face. His chest rose and fell shallowly, and not for long, or so Leia seemed to think by the press of her mouth. “Rey,” she said softly, and rose to greet her daughter-by-law, embracing her. “I am glad you have come.”

“Oh, Mother Leia,” she whispered, burying her cheek in the older woman’s soft, rose-scented clothing. “I am sorry he is so poorly. Is there anything to be done?”

“Nothing,” said Leia, pulling away. “He woke a moment ago and moaned, waving his hand, but I could not understand what he meant. Then he fell asleep again.”

“Perhaps he wished to write his last wishes,” said Rey. “Although, he is left-handed now, is he not? Lord, what a predicament.”

Luke’s eyes fluttered open, blue and glassy, at the mention of the Lord’s name being used in vain, and he groaned, glaring at Rey, then motioned again with his left hand. “A pencil,” said Leia, and Luke nodded sharply, eyes searching for his sister. “Very well— one moment—” and a pencil was pressed into the man’s hand, a paper set up on a slate to scratch on, and Rey held it steady as Luke concentrated, making scrawling, sloppy marks like a child’s. 

_ ALL TO POOR _

“Yes, I understand,” said Rey, looking at the words: all Luke had, then, was to be given to the less fortunate. 

“Brother,” said Leia quietly. “You must tell us. What did this to you? That catamount? Write it. I beg you. We must send out a hunting party—”

Luke made a low, barking noise, and wrote again, as carefully as he could in his childish, clumsy scrawl with the wrong hand in a scribble that looked to read

_ REN _

“Ren?” asked Leia, confused as she read the messy scribble over his shoulder. “What on earth is a—”

Luke made another noise and focused on the R, looping it back and connecting it to the stalk, which made it more clearly read

_ BEN _

  
  


The hair on Rey’s neck stood up as Dr. Dameron’s eyes suddenly spun to train on her like a pointer dog's. She could not breathe. Ben.  _ Ben, _ so Luke had seen Ben attack him? She was not mad after all? He was real, and true, and—

“You are feverish,” said Leia softly, stroking her brother’s hair back from his sweat-dotted brow. “Ben is dead, my dear Luke. Surely it was the panther.”

"He does not know what he is writing," said Dameron softly, looking away from Rey to tend to his patient.

But Luke was shaking his head, his eyes fixed on Rey, and suddenly she was glad of the fact that he was mute as a stump: Dameron was watching her like a hawk, and she found an excuse to get away once Luke had slipped back into his feverish dreams, moaning in his sleep.

He never woke again.

* * *

The burial was hastily done the same day, less than the minister of Walker’s Hollow deserved, and dutifully attended by everyone who could attend on short notice— the ground would soon freeze quite solid. 

Rey stood by Leia’s side, eyes unseeing as they lowered the casket in and the young man Luke had been training as a minister tearfully gave a short sermon about the hope of the Resurrection.  _ Yes, resurrection may come, _ she thought, shuddering,  _ but not in the end of days.  _ Imagine: Luke like Ben, a body undead, haunting the living and lusting for life! That was unbearable. She felt, however, that given the choice between an eternal rest or coming back to finish his work on this earth, Luke would take the eternal rest, stubbornly clinging to his faith in death as he had clung to it in life. No, there would be no bits of soul snapped up by any man in black for him. 

Dameron doffed his hat after the service and came to her side. “Mrs. Solo,” he said in a low voice after paying his respects to Leia. “I think I must be frank with you on the matter of— well, all manner of things. May I walk with you?”

“Go on,” said Rey to Leia, taking her hand. How soon again it seemed they were in their Sunday best for a funeral, though it had been but six months. “I will meet you at the house later.”

“Oh, take your time in walking,” said Leia, and kissed her cheek before turning about. Rey felt uncomfortable at the implication, and made to protest, but Dameron was speaking in a soft, urgent voice, and she checked herself as they moved away from the cemetery.

“You came upon something in that house of yours that frightened you badly, and put you in mind of your late husband, asking me if I was sure whether or not he was dead. Then, your uncle— rest his soul—turns up maimed with you in tow, but before dying, writes the name of his dead nephew, your same husband, when asked who did this thing to him, and I saw you go white as paper— no, do not deny it.” Dameron’s eyes were fiery with concentration. “Something is amiss here. Something… you are not telling anyone.”

“My uncle was feverish and out of his mind,” said Rey, throat as dry as dust. “You saw he could barely write what he did, and who’s to say what that scratch was?”

“Mrs. Solo, I must demand you be clear. What did you see in your house that frightened you so?”

She could not breathe. “I told you before, I have no explanation that I can give.”

He was not, it seemed, to be deterred. “I must know. If more people are to be maimed or killed by this thing, and it has something to do with a dead man—”

“Don’t ask me!” she cried, whirling on him with a sudden passion that stopped him in his tracks. “Please, don’t, don’t press me on it: I don’t know! I don’t know. I'm just as confused as you, sir, but the one thing I do know is that people who harass and frighten and press me, or lay hands on me— they end up dead, don’t they? Ain't that true, if nothing else is?”

“They do,” he said, and looked more reserved. “And what you mean is to say that I shouldn’t do the same, lest I meet the same fate.”

“I do,” she said, slightly relieved that he seemed happy to leave it at that. 

* * *

“You could do worse than the doctor for a husband,” said Leia as they sat at table that evening. 

“Mercy above,” said Rey, tired beyond words and longing already for quiet company that did not move or bustle or speak so often. “I don’t want to marry again. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”

“You can’t be always living in the past, dear,” said Leia gently. “Nevertheless, I understand. Think on it, though, won’t you?”

“I will. If you’ll excuse me, I want to go back to the shanty,” she mumbled, half-shy as she got up. She had packed her clothes already, and some food to take.

Leia’s brows drew down. “You have not spent a moment in that house since the day Ben died, and now you spend three nights there all together?” she asked. 

“Yes,” said Rey stubbornly. “Perhaps doing so will help me live less in the past and more in the present. We might call it a scientific experiment. Good night, Mother.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- aaaand FINN IS HERE!!   
> \- the history of how racism was weaponized to keep workers ~in their place~ by capitalist forces in the first half of the 20th century is terrible. most all mining towns were segregated by color too.  
> -ONLY 2 MORE CHAPTERS O NO WHAT WILL HAPPEN

When she got to the house, it was dark, the doors still shut as she had left them. Rey stepped up with her valise and opened it, starting with an exclamation of shock as Ben’s dark silhouette came into view, sitting at the table in the pitch-dark, cold night. “I did not expect you,” she stammered.

“I been waiting for a time,” he said in a voice gone calm and quiet. The jar of salted water was at his elbow. “You’ve been out since morning.”

“I know. Dameron fetched me. Your uncle is dead.” She set the valise on the table and lit the lamp, which glowed bright and golden and illuminated Ben: still as he had appeared last night, with lavender-blue lips and fingertips. “I had to go to the funeral, too, this afternoon. It’s been a devil of a day.”

“You mean I killed him,” said Ben, without much inflection. His pale hand balled itself into a tight fist on the table. “I ought to feel guilty, shouldn’t I? That ain't what you wanted.”

“Well, he _did_ propose marriage to me,” answered Rey, “and then struck me in the face, so you can consider my feelings on the matter mixed up at best.”

“He _proposed,_ ” echoed Ben, and got up out of his seat so fast Rey nearly missed it. “I only saw him strike you. He proposed to marry you? _You?_ You’re _my_ wife _._ _Mine_.” The last word came out in a half-growl.

She had to smile. Even in her imagination, this specter of her husband was just as protective as he had been in life, regardless of her imaginings that he possessed no emotions. “I would have refused if I had been paying the slightest bit of attention.”

He was hardly listening. “I should have ripped his throat out, that— conniving— pious—” A noise tore from his throat, and he turned toward her, eyes wide. “Rey. I just felt— I feel something. Inside me, I think.”

“Does it hurt?” asked Rey, startled. 

“I don’t rightly know. I—it’s gone now. Maybe I just thought it up. But I thought I felt something like it yesterday, when I was in the bath— when you—” He pressed his pale, dry lips together and shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m imagining it. But... my God, Uncle Luke really proposed to marry you? What was my mother like about it?”

“Your mother, bless her, and mind you there ain’t no ill will there— she’s been hurling me with a fury at every eligible man she can lay eyes on. Huxley first, for she said he’d be superintendent soon, after Pryde goes, and just this evening the doctor.” She sat down as Ben’s face changed to a look like thunder. “And it’s not as if I can say that I’m married still, is it? What with no one knowing you’re about but—” She stopped herself, hesitant: suppose he found out Dameron suspected something was not right? Would something awful happen? She did not know, nor did she wish to find out. “If the rumors don’t stop about me bein’ connected somehow to the killings, I won’t find employment as a teacher hereabouts, and I— I  _ shall _ have to get married again just to live, won’t I?”

He made a furious sound and turned his back, shoulders hunched. “But I’m your husband,” he said in a small, tight voice a moment later. 

Rey felt a stab of impatience rise up. “You are my husband. You’re also dead, in case you forgot. I need more than a protector, Ben, or the memory of one— I need money to live and food and shelter, and you can’t—”

Ben whirled back on her. “I’ll kill anyone you marry for money,” he snarled, and Rey froze where she sat, pinned and helpless by the force of his sudden temper. “I’ll tear them apart and crush ‘em so fine they’ll never be found, not a bone, not a tooth. You’re  _ my wife. _ ”

“You’re...  _ angry _ ,” said Rey, stunned. “You said you couldn’t feel nothin’, and—”

“You’re damn right I’m angry!” he bellowed. “You’re my wife, and ain’t nobody else marrying you as long as I’m around to have a say!” Ben’s broad body jerked slightly, as if convulsing, and he slid to the chair, stumbling on his feet. Rey darted around to him, at a loss for what the matter was, and he raised his head, trembling, sweat standing out on his upper lip. “It hurts,” he gasped, clinging to the table. “My, my chest—”

“Your chest?” Rey pressed a hand to his breast. Under her palm, she felt the unmistakable, deep  _ thud, thud _ of a heartbeat— a heartbeat that was struggling to go on, and died away under her hands as she listened with bated breath. “Ben— your  _ heart, _ it was beating.”

“It hurts,” he said, his breath coming in smaller gasps. “It hurts so much, havin’ a heart. Feelin’ things. I don’t— I can’t— why’s it hurt so much?”

“Feelin’ things hurts,” she said, keeping her hand pressed close to his still, silent chest in hopes she might hear it again. “Loving hurts, too.”

“Rey,” he said, strangled and weak. She turned her head: he was nosing his way into her throat, right where the blood ran hottest and strongest, and to her shock, she saw that there was a noticeable lump in his trousers where he sat, squirming, as if to relieve the pressure. “I— I don’t know what—”

“Your blood is pumpin’. Or was.” Her cheeks felt hot as fire. “That’s all.”

“I don’t… want to lose it,” Ben panted, soft and cool on her neck. “Oh, God help me, Rey.” 

She felt, beneath her palm, another steady, even beat, a movement that forced a shudder through Ben. “Your heart’s beating. It is, it’s ‘cause you’re—”

“I got, I—” and Ben slid out of his chair, down to the floor where he lay flat on his back, Rey following him down and clinging to him. He felt clammy and cool, the blood not warm, but he looked as if he was straining, his face taut as she bent over him, straddling his thigh. Her hands still chased that elusive heartbeat that came and went like a panicked bird hitting a window. “Please. I want, I, I  _ can _ feel somethin’ and it’s making me, my— this is, this ain’t right, is it?”

“What ain’t right?” she whispered, bending over him. 

“This. I, I—” He looked painfully embarrassed, trying to cover his shame with one hand. “I ain’t alive. I shouldn’t be…having the feelings I’m having. I shouldn’t be having feelings at all, not since they got taken out of me. Not, not anger, or, or—wantin’ my wife like this.”

“Maybe some things are stronger than the Devil,” said Rey, barely daring to breathe.  _ Maybe you’re real after all, and this ain’t a dream: maybe I’ll bring you back to life, and we’ll walk out of this town forever and never look back. _

“My heart,” he gasped, wracking a little with every beat that struggled to push his blood through his dead body, “my heart ain’t, it hurts, it— but it don’t hurt, not really, it just feels mighty strange.”

“You still got a, a—” Rey floundered, unable to name the thing she couldn’t tear her eyes away from in his trousers, and Ben chanced a look at her from under his lashes.

“A cockstand?” he supplied. “Uh-huh.”

“Can I see it?” she asked, cheeks still flush with heat. 

“You can see anything you like, I guess,” Ben whispered, and tugged his pants down, fumbling with the buttons on his union suit until he had pulled himself free and lay there, waiting with one hand splayed out on his belly, for her inspection.

Rey looked at it. There was no healthy pink-red flush at the tip, only a muted, purplish-blue color, but he was still hard, pale and solid. “Can I touch it?” she whispered, hesitant, but curious. He had never let her do such a thing before, in life or in death.

“You might,” he said, and closed his eyes as she ran a finger up the length of him. He felt cool to the touch, like the rest of his body did. 

“You don’t think you can…” Rey could hardly say it. “Make, make, um, spunk?”

“I don’t think so,” he said roughly, blinking very fast as she curled her hand about him. “You, you might. Warm me up a bit.”

“Like this?” Rey rubbed at him gently, hoping the friction would give him some warmth, and Ben made a little sound of half-pain, his thighs twitching under the heavy material of his work pants. “It doesn’t hurt?”

“No,” he whispered, eyes closed tight. Rey let her other hand trail down, curiously feeling for where his balls ought to be, but finding only coarse dark hair. “They’re all... pulled in,” he explained, opening his eyes again and focusing on her. “Too cold for ‘em. Can’t— I can’t get warm enough.”

“Oh. I was just wondering,” she said. Her own body felt far too warm, as if her skin was prickling, her belly all hot and twisted up, her cunny gone molten and soft and wanting. She hardly dared ask it, but it was out of her mouth before she could stop herself. “Ben, I don’t suppose—well, suppose you’d have me like this.”

He looked up, his eyes black in the lamplight above, and she felt another ragged heartbeat tear through his still, cold body. “You’re my wife,” he whispered, voice shaky. “Ain’t you?”

“Ain’t I?” she shot back, ready to tug him atop her and demand he have her in every way he could manage, imaginary or no. “And not a widow, since my husband threatens all my suitors with certain death?”

The desire slid off his face, then, his eyes becoming blank and empty as pits. “This isn’t right,” he said, and pushed himself up, shuddering a little as Rey backed away, surprised and hurt. “I’m, I  _ am _ dead. I can’t, I shouldn’t touch you like that. You shouldn’t touch me so. It ain’t right.” He shoved everything back into his trousers and yanked them up hard without looking at her.

“But—” Rey swallowed and looked away, the sting of rejection burning bright. “But you said I was your wife.”  _ Even when I imagine my husband in death, he still turns away from me, and I get no satisfaction: what sort of a woman am I? _

“You  _ are _ my wife!” he snapped, dragging his hands down his face in a gesture she remembered well. “But I’m, you— you’re alive, you’re livin’ and warm and you got your whole soul inside you and I— I ain’t nothing. I’m half a man, I ain’t got myself together in one piece no more.” His shoulders slumped, as if all the fight had drained out of him. “Maybe you should get married again,” he said softly, sounding more defeated and small than Rey had ever heard him. “To someone who’s whole, and can give you money, and a home, and more than— than blood and violence.”

“Ben,” she began, stunned: that had never been like him. “Ben, you can’t mean that. You’d give me up so easy?”

“The way I see it,” he said, looking at her, “you ought to get wed to someone else, and then do me the favor of putting that nail through my heart, so I can just rest and go on. I can’t bear this at all: I shouldn’t have come back. It ain’t natural, this… thing I am now.”

An iron nail through his heart? Rey could not bear the thought of such a thing— the heart that she had felt struggle so valiantly to beat under her hand, the heart that leapt to his breast when he felt passion? Destroying that fragile shade of life was unthinkable. She would not do it. “I ain’t marrying anyone,” she said defiantly. “I’m no widow, not now that you're...”

“You  _ are  _ a widow,” Ben said harshly, and got up from his place on the floorboards. “I don’t belong here. I can’t be here. I’m leaving Walker’s Hollow. I’ll leave you be.”

“But—” she protested, shocked, and got up, following as he lumbered to the door. “Ben, don’t go. Please.” He couldn’t mean to leave her here in this house, cold and alone— but the door creaked open and he stepped through it, and like a flash, he was gone. “Ben!” Rey rushed to the door, looking out into the street with wild eyes, but saw nothing: only the dark and empty street.

* * *

Mad or no, she followed. There was no way to know where he had gone, but he would never seek to hide in the town, not in Walker’s Hollow, so Rey put on her warmest things and hurried into the woods: no lantern, for she did not need it, and didn't fancy the idea of being caught out and forced to explain herself.  _ Suppose I am eaten by a bear, suppose I get lost?  _ she thought, and pushed it impatiently from her mind— she could consider that later. 

The path was unclear and hard to follow, especially in the dark, and Rey’s breath came in clouds as she doggedly made her way through the leafless trees. Every one of them looked skeletal and mocking in the dark. She pressed on, calling, “Ben!” as she got further from the Hollow, but the path began to falter and disappear soon, until she was fighting her way through thickets and thorny brambles that caught at her skirt like so many hands. “Ben?” she called, shoving past them. “Ben? Come back!”

The ripple of water met her ears after an hour or so of walking, and she stumbled down a bank and to the crick: swollen and rushing with rain in the summer season, it was a slow-moving, freezing thing now, choked with ice and mud and mining runoff. She could just make out white ripples moving in the dark. “Ben!” she shouted again, sliding down toward the water. “Are you here?” The crick was the northernmost boundary of the Hollow— past it, the First Coal Company owned nothing. She had never been outside Walker’s Hollow in her life, but if Ben had left, if he was out there…  _ Perhaps he went east, or south, or west. Perhaps I dreamed him, perhaps...  _ “Ben?” she called again, trembling as she made her way down to the river. 

There was no answer. Rey put her foot out, gasping at the chill of the frigid water soaking into her shoes, but she must press on: she had to find him again. “Ben!” she shouted, louder. “I’m coming!”

“Mrs. Solo!”

The cry went up from the bank above, and Rey turned, shocked and startled, to see Dr. Dameron waving a lantern, muffled and coated, with a man at his side she had never seen before. “Doctor?” she called, stunned. “What are you doing out at this time of night?”

“I might ask you the same! Don’t go into that water, ma’am: it’s faster than it looks. Phineas, can you go and get her?”

The strange man scrambled down the bank, and Rey was surprised to see that he was black: Walker’s Hollow had whites only, for the most part, and all else kept to their own town on the eastern side of the Hollow—there was some resentment there, she knew, for they had used to be called in for breaking strikes, but there hadn’t been a strike in some time. This man had a warm, kind face, and gentle eyes that she could make out even in the dark. “You had better come up, miss,” he said, reaching out a hand to her. 

She tried to lift her foot, and found it stuck firmly in sucking mud. “I am stuck, Mr. Phineas,” she said as primly as she could. 

“Pull up firm,” he instructed, and she tried, but the icy mud was like steel around her boot. “Here—” and a thick, strong arm wrapped about her waist, she was pulled free, Phineas lost his balance, staggered, and both of them fell to the bank, Rey landing atop the man with a muffled gasp and rolling off him into the mud. 

“I’m sorry!” she gasped, sitting up as Dameron rushed down. “Oh, Lord—”

“Now see here,” said Dameron, picking her up firmly and setting her on her feet, “I don’t know if you have suddenly lost your head, Mrs. Solo, but running around in the dead of night in the winter screaming for your dead husband and threatening to drown yourself is not my idea of any sort of decent behavior to be expected of a young widow.”

“It ain’t, it isn’t what you think,” Rey protested, acutely aware of the eyes of Phineas, who watched from a distance. “I was doing no such thing— drowning myself, I mean.”

“Then you admit you were indeed roaming the woods shouting for Mr. Solo, when he is six months dead?”

“Yes, I was,” she said hotly. 

“Your mother-in-law is worried sick. She went to call on you to see if you were all right, and found the house empty, a lamp lit, and the door wide open. I have been searching for you for over an hour, and so has half the town.” Dameron cast a look on her. “You have no light. You were out here in the dark? When you know that catamount is about?”

“Oh, to hell with the catamount,” she snapped, indignant. “But if I told you all I’ve seen, you would not believe me at all— therefore I am content to be thought of as mad. Let me go. I must—” she nearly said  _ find him  _ and stopped herself at once. “I must get home. To the shanty.”

“I don’t believe the shanty is a good place for you to be,” he said firmly. 

“And how do you know, sir, what is and what is not a good place for me?” Rey demanded.

“Poe,” said Phineas, warningly, and Rey, having never heard anyone speak so familiarly to the doctor before, looked up and followed the man’s eyes to the other side of the river… where stood an indeterminate pale shape, motionless at the edge.

She lurched forward without thinking, from Dameron’s hand. “Ben!” she screamed, half-frantic and forgetting herself. “Ben, don’t go, don’t  _ go _ —”

The shape did not move. “It’s a stump,” said Dameron, bewildered, as she sank to her knees and began to cry in shame. “An old tree-stump— and Mrs. Solo, good God, we must get you back to the town and supply you with something hot. You’re half-frozen and not in your right mind.”

“I thought it was him,” she sobbed, covering her face with her chilled, numb hands. “Oh, God, I thought it was him… am I truly dreaming it all?”

“I’ll carry her, Finn,” said Dameron aside to Phineas. “Poor woman. She’s half a girl still, you know.”

“I’ll do it,” said Phineas. “I’ve got a stronger back, and you’re the better trailblazer.”

So Rey found herself lifted in a pair of strong, fine, warm arms. She shielded her face from the myriad lights and questions and cries as they came back into town, as Dameron shooed everyone away, as she was carried into his home and set down on a couch and wrapped in warm blankets, where she fell into a dozing and fitful sleep.


	9. Chapter 9

Rey felt half a prisoner in Dameron’s house, although she knew full well that she was free to go if she pleased: somehow the idea of wandering off into the woods to find who knew what frightened her more than staying put, and she did not want to think about why that might be. She remained for three days there, sitting and pacing the sitting-room, and amusing herself by looking through Dameron’s books and speaking with Mr. Phineas, who insisted that she call him Finn after a day or so, as Dameron did.

For yes, that gentleman also stayed, and Dameron had made clear to everyone in the town he was to be treated with respect—so everyone did, and Rey found herself rather enjoying the man’s company. She had never had the occasion yet in her life to sit and make conversation with a black man, nor anyone who was not from her side of Walker’s Hollow, and found that he was a good conversationalist: intelligent, kind, fiercely loyal to Dameron for reasons he would not detail, and full of good humor. He had all sorts of advice she had never heard: about how to get rid of a boo hag, and how to lay your Bible to make sure nobody did you any harm, and how a red ribbon would tie the Devil to you at the crossroads at midnight so he could not escape (she hid a roll of her eyes and touched the faded red ribbon on her braid as he wiggled his brows at her to make her laugh), and how to paint your porch ceiling haint-blue to shoo ghosts away from your home: his mother, a Gullah-woman, had told him all about it. 

“I know he’s makin’ you watch me to see that I don’t go throw myself into the crick,” she told him one evening, dropping her usual company voice: it seemed pointless to speak like a respectable, proper person these days, when Mother Solo was always away teaching. 

Phineas’s teeth flashed white in a grin. “I can swim, Miss Rey. You can’t, or very badly, if I understand Poe rightly.”

“Oh, he’s right,” she grumbled, handing him a piece of toast. “If it goes over my head I am hopeless. I never learned as a child: too many skirts and petticoats and such. The boys are the lucky ones.”

“Ain’t they?” said Phineas, eating his toast. “I never learned till last year, and I’m not very good, but I reckon I’m stronger than you, on account of not wearing a hundred skirts to do it in. Why would you want to go into that river anyway?”

“It was the crossing I wanted, not the river,” she told him, sitting down. “If I told you why, you wouldn’t believe me, Mr. Finn. Or maybe you would. You said your folk believe in— in ghosts and haints and such?”

“Some do, some don’t,” said Phineas. “Haints? I do like a good ghost story. What’s yours, then?”

He was so friendly that she felt she could not help but trust him. “You may laugh at me, and perhaps I ought to laugh at myself,” she said, drawing herself up. “Very well, then— say a miner died in a terrible explosion that burnt off half his face and body?”

“A tragedy,” said Phineas, chewing.

“And then say that people started dying, sudden-like, torn to bits by something huge and awful, and everyone thought it was a catamount?”

“Hmm,” said Phineas. 

“And then say that the widow of the miner went home one day, and who do you think came up the porch steps, but her dead husband— except he weren’t dead, not really, only halfway so, with a great big awful burn down this side of his face and his chest,” she indicated with her right hand, “and said he’d sold a bit of his soul to a shadowy man in black, in exchange for comin’ back to protect her, but he hadn’t come back right at all?”

“I’d jump out of my skin if that happened,” said Phineas.

“And say that the widow was so lonely and tired she preferred his company, even after he said he was the one what tore up three folks and killed ‘em dead? You’d say that’d be a mad woman, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know about that,” said Phineas. “I know plenty of folks who are lonely and tired and just need a spell of rest before goin’ on with life. I wouldn’t call ‘em mad.”

Rey felt slightly bolstered up. “Well, then suppose the man got so upset over the prospect of not bein’ able to be a proper husband to his wife anymore that he ran off into the woods, and the wife followed him, and then the town doctor and his friend stumbled on her while she was callin’ out that she was going to cross the river to where she thought he’d run to?”

“Oh-h-h,” said Phineas, nodding. “I see, now. And the husband wasn’t dead?”

“Well, not really. Not… dead, as in, rotting in the ground. He walked and talked, and breathed, and anyone could reach out and touch him.”

“And someone else has seen him?” asked Phineas.

“Yes, I think so: my uncle in law, the minister. He tore his hand off— I mean, Ben tore the minister’s tongue out, too, and his hand, and later on it festered and he died, but— but it looked to me as if the reverend wrote out his name when we asked what had done it before he died.” Rey caught herself, but the damage was done. “Well, now you see the fact of it: I am completely mad, and think my husband is back from the grave.”

“Not so much,” said Phineas softly, tilting his head. “Mmm. No, I think you got grief inside you, Miss Rey, and sometimes all that grief can come out funny, make you see things. Make you understand things that ain’t there. It don’t mean you’ve lost your mind.”

“But the minister—”

“Yes, Poe told me about all that. He said it’s his opinion that the minister was in a terrible fever, and you put meaning on that scribble where there was none.”

“Then that’s the truth, I expect,” said Rey, her belly sinking like a stone. “My husband’s dead and gone and I am dreaming up things that ain’t there. I know what I see with my eyes ain’t always right. Like that stump. I thought for a moment..."

“Certain sure lots of times people see things with their eyes and forget ‘em, or see things that aren’t there,” said Phineas reasonably. 

The door opened, and Dameron came in. “Afternoon, Mrs. Solo,” he said amiably, and Rey looked up, nodding at him as Phineas stood to get another cup of tea.

“Doctor, you’ll indulge a fancy for a moment?” he asked. “We were just speaking about haints and such.”

“I will, Finn. What is it?”

“This lady says her departed husband was burnt from the head to the waist on the right side.”

“Did she?” said Dameron, unsure and giving Phineas a strange look. “The right side, you say?” He glanced at Rey. “Can you describe in detail the way they looked, Mrs. Solo?”

“Oh, terrible, for certain sure,” she said, avoiding his keen glance and feeling very silly. “It was on the right: the same side as his scar. It went from here—” and she touched the top of her head, “and burnt his ear up, down all the way to here—” she pointed to her right thigh, “and reached round the front and the back of him to about here.” Her finger indicated her buttons and her back, then tapped her throat. “And down his neck, too, right here: he was burnt in an instant and died on the spot, yet his mouth remained untouched.”

Dameron went very pale under his olive complexion. “And who told you about his injuries in such detail?” he said, keeping his voice quite calm.

“Nobody,” said Rey, looking out the window. 

The room was very quiet. Phineas stood up. “She says Mr. Benjamin Solo has come back out of his grave and paid her a visit himself,” he said softly. 

“Not one visit, three so far,” said Rey. “And now you’ll have me sent off to some awful asylum, I’m sure.”

Dameron sat down, blinking. “Three visits?” he asked, bewildered. “You mean to say you believe your husband is yet alive?”

“No!” she said, stamping her foot. “He’s dead: you know that, he’s very dead, Doctor— deader than alive, though he moves and speaks and— I thought he killed Plut and Bowers and the Reverend for threatening me, because all he wants to do is keep me safe, you see— or that is what he said. He doesn’t mean no harm to anyone else. So I guess you were right when you said people were superstitious, thinking I had something to do with the panther attacks, except it’s not a panther, just my dead husband, but that makes not a lick of sense, I know, so I must therefore assume I have lost my mind and am dreaming up strange things and seeing them as real as you. Perhaps I am imagining that the panther is my husband: I suppose stranger things have happened.”

Dameron drew his hand over his face. “I ought to have let you see the body,” he muttered, stricken. “Then you would have gained some peace, and not— and— but how did you know the extent of those burns?”

“I told you!” she said impatiently. “I dreamed ‘em up. You see, you don’t believe me, just as I said you wouldn’t.”

“But this is impossible,” said Dameron blankly as if he did not hear her. “Impossible. He’s buried, been buried these past six months.”

“That is what I am saying,” said Rey. “The grave is all sunk down. I thought it might be empty at first, but reason tells me it is likely just the rains from the summer.”

“Yes, that is likely it,” said Dameron, giving Phineas a peculiar look.

Rey shook her head. “I don’t know,” she whispered, sounding very small and alone. “Perhaps I want him to be alive so badly that I have fooled myself into thinking he has come back to me. I do not know what is true anymore.”

“You go on and drink this, it’ll calm you some,” said Dameron, giving her tea in a cup. “Finn, I want a word with you alone.”

Rey drank the tea, and felt curiously sleepy afterward: she dropped off on the sofa, head nodding, while Phineas stole out of the room with Dameron.

* * *

“I don’t know what to make of it,” confessed the doctor in hushed tones between the sitting room and the surgery. “She never saw his body, not a single time— I made sure of it, and yet she sits there and describes to me in perfect detail the burns on his corpse? This is unheard of, Finn.”

“I think she’s being truthful,” said Phineas. “Whether she thinks she is mad or sane, I cannot say.”

“What! About her husband back from the dead? Impossible. Such a thing has never happened: it goes against all known laws of nature.”

“And how many people do you know who would say that a particular friendship such as ours is impossible, too, and goes against all laws of nature?” demanded Phineas, in a lower voice.

Dameron reddened and ducked his head. “That is different.”

“Not from where I stand,” said Phineas. “I believe the girl, or at least I believe she believes that she’s being truthful, even though she is willing to allow for delusions and madness.”

“Then the question remains: what do I do about it as a doctor of medicine? I can’t let her leave in this state,” said Dameron. “And let us suppose that Mr. Solo is walking about, dead yet alive, if that is even possible—what on earth am I to do about that?”

“Well, I know one way to find out with our own eyes if he is resting in his grave or walking about in the woods,” said Phineas darkly, raising both eyebrows.

“Oh, Lord,” said Dameron after a moment. He closed his eyes. “I will get the shovels. You get a couple of lanterns. I gave her enough laudanum to make her sleep a while. Time enough to discover the truth of it all.”

* * *

Rey woke, very groggy. It was still dark, but nearing sunrise: the eastern sky was growing pale. How strange— only a moment ago she had been nodding off on the couch. She had the queerest feeling: as if someone had just been leaning over her, calling her name.

_ Rey.  _

She slid off the sofa, walking to the window. Nobody was about yet. Where was Dr. Dameron? Or Mr. Finn? They must have left her to sleep on the sofa. Peculiar: she had a room upstairs here. 

_ I ought to go and find Ben. _

So, she must pretend another moment that she was not mad: she slipped the string tethering her to reason a moment and let herself believe he was truly out there somewhere, waiting. The thought was both thrilling and terrifying: suppose he did not want her still? It had been more than four days since she had seen him last. Suppose he had become like a wild animal, suppose he leaped upon her and tore her to bits, suppose she got lost?

“But he’s your husband,” she whispered, and the thought sprang back into her mind: that pale, stricken, scarred body on her floor, a man that strained to feel a heartbeat, that strained for her.  _ You’re my wife.  _ And his heart had been trying, trying to beat so hard, all for her...

Her feet took her out of the house, and down into the street. Nobody was about, and she drew her shawl close about her head and arms, hurrying along. She knew the way to the creek, and made for the spot with the surest and quickest step she could. Her breath came in clouds of smoke through the winter air, and her feet stepped faster and faster as she reached the creek.

The easiest place to cross was the shallowest place, but that would take her out of her path: the swimming-hole was closest to the path and she had no desire to get herself lost again. Rey took her shoes off and left them on the bank, then hitched her skirts up and did her best to gauge the depth.

_ The cold may get me before the water does, _ she thought, and dipped her stockinged foot in. The chill was enough to take her breath away, but she set her shoulders, determined.  _ I must find him. I must: whether he be dream or real.  _ Rey took a deep breath and marched forward, gasping in shock as the cold water swallowed her from toe to hip, her skirts floating out and billowing up with the trapped air, then sinking, heavy with freezing water and weighing her down. Her teeth chattered as she forged on, paddling with her hands.  _ Ben. Ben.  _

Her foot slipped and she dipped down, choking as the water closed over her head: it was too deep here, she had no foothold and her clothes were too heavy. Rey fought to break water again, kicking to the surface, but only broke to gasp in air for a moment before her heavy skirt pulled her down again. She was too terrified to open her eyes under the water, and kept kicking until her legs ached, her muscles gone to nothing.  _ Oh, God, I shall die, _ she thought, distant and afraid, and heard a crashing, dim sound somewhere far off.  _ Dynamite: they have flooded the river… _

Something gripped her, hard as iron and cold as ice. 

She was pulled, her head lolling, and broke the surface again, choking and gasping as she was pulled to safety, lugged up the bank and into the trees, and set out on her side, a hand over her eyes. “Rey,” said a voice she knew well, and she moaned aloud, trembling with joy: she had found him at last. 

“Ben—” She reached for his wrist, but he made a sharp noise.

“No. You can’t look at me in the daylight. I done told you.”

“You’re my husband,” she gasped, sodden and cold as a wet fish. “Please. I don’t care, I don’t care if I’m dreaming it all, mad, I won’t marry again: I just want to see you, be with you—”

The hand was torn away, and she blinked up into the pale light: the sun had not yet risen, and Ben crouched above her, his scarred face a tapestry of ruined pink burns and pale, bluish flesh. He looked as if he had not bathed in days, and there was bracken in his hair: his eyes were clouded, and his lips were pale as paper and dry. He had never looked more dead, nor more a welcome sight. “You want... this,” he rasped, looking down at her. 

“Ben,” she whispered, and reached up for him. “Please.”

“I could… hear you,” he said, low and rough and holding himself away. “Your blood, inside you— your heartbeat— I went back to the house and waited, waited every night and you didn’t come back, you left me there.”

“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, shaking her head as she began to cry, thinking of him all alone in the dark and the cold, waiting for four nights. “Oh, Ben, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

He leaned close and sniffed. “You been given something. Someone gave you a drug?” 

She shook her head, not understanding. “Nobody gave me nothing. Ben… please, I just want you. Can’t you just hold me?”

Ben was not to be deterred. A muscle in his jaw knotted up. “Who’s goin’ around druggin’ my  _ wife? _ ”

She lunged up and knocked him to his back, desperate for something, anything to hold to. “Will you forget revenge and listen to me for once, you great big fool?” she demanded, half-laughing through her tears. “I want you, I want you so bad it’s takin’ the breath outta me, so let me  _ have _ you, will you?”

HIs hair lay spread like a halo of silk, inky-black, in the bracken. “What, out here?” he whispered, throat bobbing. “I got a hidey-hole back a piece: I’ll take you to it.”

“Yes, take me there,” said Rey. “Please.”

* * *

Dawn was coming on, and Phineas and Dameron were working feverishly to get the grave of Benjamin Solo exhumed. The soil was packed and firm after six months, and it was taking some time to dig down six feet. “God forbid somebody sees us,” muttered Dameron as Phineas took a moment to wipe his gleaming brow deep in the hole, the sky overhead becoming grayer and lighter by the minute. “You’ve hit nothing yet, have you, Finn?”

“No. Keep on going, Poe. You’re no quitter,” said Phineas lightly, and stamped his shovel back down. 

Dameron grumbled, but kept digging. Step, push, toss. Step, push, toss. His shoulders and arms were long-unused to manual labor: he would feel these aches for a week. 

_ Thunk. _

“I hit wood,” said Phineas, looking alert and startled.

“The coffin,” said Dameron, scrambling to his side. “Clear it away, get the lid clean.”

* * *

The place Ben took her was a little glen, which in the summer must have been beautiful, but now was only a space between two leafless trees, lined with dead leaves, and rimed in frost. He set her down in the middle and took pains to spread out her wet things, for Rey was shivering mightily. “Take off those things,” he said, plucking at her shirtwaist and coat with cold fingers. “I don’t fancy both of us being’ dead in this cold.”

She stripped down to knickers and camisole, shivering and shy, and laid her clothes out as he started a fire with clumsy hands. The warmth soaked her to her bones, and she kept her hands out, aching for the heat of the flame, wishing she could eat it alive and get warm.

_ Oh. That must be some of how he feels. _

Ben shook out her shawl and hung it by the fire over a branch. “You feel all right?” he asked, rough and awkward as ever. 

“Mm-hm,” she said, huddling closer to the fire. “You?”

“Same as ever,” he said darkly, coming to sit by her. “Thought I felt somethin’ when I pulled you out of the river.”

“And now?” Rey laid her hand on his cold, clammy one, and he flinched away. 

“No. Don’t. You’re so warm, Rey, and alive, and living’—and I can’t, I can’t touch you like a husband ought to.”

“We ain’t havin’ this argument again,” she said hotly, getting on her knees. “You’re my husband. I ain’t marrying nobody else: not Dameron and not Huxley and not anyone, not while you’re still above ground walkin’ and talkin’ and maybe not for a while after you’re below it. Don’t you understand? I love you.”

Ben’s brows twitched as he looked at her, his dry mouth opening, and he reached for her face with tenderness in his clouded eyes. “You love me like this?” he whispered. 

“I love you any way you are.” Rey leaned forward and kissed his burnt, pink, rough cheek with her hand over his breast, and Ben let out a soft groan: his heart thudded inside his chest at the touch again. “And if the Devil comes and tries to take you from me, I’ll— I’ll give him the lickin’ of his life,” she added.

“Rey,” he whispered, and she embraced him tight, burying her face in his dirty hair and fighting tears. His heart was still valiantly struggling to beat, erratic and rough: she could feel it. “Then you, you oughta take me quick, ‘cause I’m fixin’ to burst right out of my chest,” he said.

“Lie down,” she said, and he did, flat on his back in the bracken and dead leaf matter in his union suit and dirty pants. “I know you want life, Ben, but I’m alive, and I want things too— things I didn’t know how to ask you for, and things I maybe still don’t. So I’ll show you instead what I want, and maybe— maybe you’ll see what I mean.”

“All right,” he answered, and he let her tug his union suit open from throat to groin, exposing his body to her sight. She was not so cold anymore, not by the fire, not even in her knickers and camisole in the freezing air, and she trailed her hand down his chest half-shyly, but more boldly as he closed his eyes and let his mouth fall open. “You’re warm as a coal,” he said quietly, looking up at her.

Rey bent down over him and kissed him on the mouth. He was cold, damp from the river, and smelled of earth, but it was the gentlest kiss she had ever given, and he returned it with the most cautious one he had ever given: his tongue rasping soft across her lip. Heat washed through her and she flung her leg over his hips, pressing him there into the ground: there would be no running this time. “I was afraid,” she whispered, her hands on either side of his head as she searched his face. 

“What were you afraid of? Me?” Ben’s long, soft eyes blinked slowly as his hands drifted to her waist, hovering just above the sodden white cotton that clung to every inch of her skin. “I wouldn’t never hurt you, Rey.”

“Not you,” she said, tucking his soft, filthy hair behind his ear. “No, not you. Lie still a moment, will you?”

He nodded, and Rey reached down, tugging his cock free of his knit underwear. It was half-hard, heavy and swelling in her hand as Ben gazed up at her, eyes fixed on her breasts beneath the camisole. She looked down and saw that her nipples were peaked and hard, the wet fabric stuck to them, and reached up with her free hand to touch one, nibbling at her lip as the light touch made her shiver. “Rey,” he said hoarsely, unable to tear his eyes away.

“You never saw ‘em,” she said, trembling from cold or eagerness or fear: she had no idea which. “Never touched ‘em, either, did you, Ben?”

“No,” he said, his throat bobbing as he swallowed. In her hand, he went as stiff and hard as iron.

“Did you ever want to?” Rey let go of his cockstand and unbuttoned her camisole, her belly thrilling with the thing she was about to do. “Did you want to come up on me in the bath Saturday nights, when you left me to wash?”

A sound like a torn sob escaped Ben’s dry throat. “Yes,” he whispered. “But I thought… I thought I oughtn’t to bother you, since— since you didn’t like it, didn’t, I thought—”

Rey tugged her camisole off completely, letting the straps sag about her upper arms and her breasts hang free, pale in the cold morning air, nipples tight and budding. Ben went silent, staring up with a yearning look on his face, and she took his right hand from her waist, pressing it to her left breast. “I like it,” she said, and he squeezed gently, testing the give and weight, his mouth slack and open. “I like it fine. I would have liked it if you’d done it then. I was just… afraid to say it, I guess, or ask.”

“What else d’you like?” he rasped, his thumb trailing across her nipple. 

“This,” she breathed, and pulled her knickers aside: they were an old-fashioned pair, split down the middle between her legs, and settled herself to rest along the length of his cockstand. Ben shut his eyes, his mouth trembling as she rubbed on him. “Do you, you like it?”

“I like it fine. More’n fine.” His voice had gone up, twisting and breaking like she hadn’t heard it do since he was a boy of fourteen. “You can. Go on... doin’ it.”

Rey had ridden a mule before once, long ago when she was younger. She remembered the rocking, the way she’d been told to sit and move her hips, and put that to mind now, thrusting her hips back and forth gently. It felt blessedly warm, delightful pleasure sparking through her body as she rode the length of him, pleasure that started between her thighs and ended somewhere by her toes. “I like it more’n fine, too,” she gasped, blushing and grasping the hand that still clung to her breast. 

“You sure?” he asked, gazing up at her.

“Yes,” Rey said firmly. “I told you before, didn’t I? Now lie still a moment. I want--well, I’ll show you,” and she reached down, taking him in hand and guiding him to where she wanted him most. He felt cool to her touch, but not icy any more: her body must have warmed him.

“Hot,” he whined, like a kicked dog. “Oh, Rey.  _ Please _ .”

So she took him home, sinking down full and warm: there were no walls here, nor any ears to hear, so she shouted her delight aloud to the barren trees as she rode him, tears streaming down her face. Her husband was with her, and there was nothing else that mattered— even if it was a dream, she thought, she never wished it to stop. Something was building within her, something heavy and bright and threatening to tear her open, but Ben was with her, holding her tight, and she set the thing free and wailed out into the cold air as pleasure ripped through her body from cunny to scalp, her body so hot she thought she might burn alive. 

“Ben,” she sobbed, unable to hold herself up straight as she collapsed into his chest, gasping. “Ben.”

“I’m here,” he whispered, wrapping his arms about her, and they lay there together, gasping, on the forest floor as the pale golden sun broke over the trees, drowning all in light.

* * *

Phineas finished sweeping the dirt off the lid, and stared at it in shock. “Dameron…” he said, voice trailing off. 

The doctor clambered down the side of the hole. In the winter morning sunshine that did not yet touch the grass, it was clear that something was not right: the lid of the coffin was loose, the nails torn up by some force stronger than a man could have done. Dameron knelt and pulled the lid free, raising it up and leaning it against the wall of the hole, and the air left Phineas in a soft exhale of incredulity.

The coffin was empty. Nothing remained in the wooden box at all: only crumbling dirt. 

Phineas looked up at Dameron, and Dameron looked at Phineas, and neither of them said a word.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> happy halloween!!! thank you for coming along on the ride with me!

Rey lifted her head from Ben’s chest, feeling pleasantly tired, but warm with his heavy arms about her. The morning was cold, and the fire they had built was dying. “Ben,” she said softly, kissing his cold cheek. 

He did not move beneath her, though his eyes were open. She frowned and stirred, and his arms fell away, limp and heavy. “Ben?”

“So,” said a dark, smooth voice, and Rey jerked to her feet at once, clutching her camisole to her chest in a flurry of dead leaves and moss. A man was standing at the edge of the glen, a man in all black, dressed like the richest man Rey had ever seen. Black silk waistcoat: jacket, trousers, the crispest white shirt and collar, and a beaver-fur hat to ward against the cold. His face was hard to make out— she did not know if he was young or old. “Good morning, Mrs. Solo.”

“I have not had the pleasure, sir,” she said, fear pricking up her back. 

“No, but you will again, one day. My, my.” He stepped down into the hollow, and Rey felt the desire to rush to Ben’s side, to wake him up— but she knew, knew he was dead, and that she surely must be dreaming it all. “You have put a wrench in my deal, young lady.”

“Have I?” She put her hands on her hips, forgetting she was in split knickers and an undone camisole. “And what deal might that be, sir?”

“The deal I made with Mr. Solo,” he replied, “to take that bit of his soul that felt all love, and grief, and pain, and in exchange he might come back to see that you were taken care of.”

“And how have I interrupted these no doubt benevolent plans?” she demanded, heedless of the thing inside her that said she ought to step carefully, fantasy or no. 

The man in black came to a halt by Ben’s still form. “I had not considered that you would so love a dead man’s walking body. Some might call it a sin, Mrs. Solo. And yet you have gone and lain with him like a wife again.”

“What has that to do with your deal?” she asked. “And why is he lying like that, without seeing or speaking: why ain’t— isn’t he awake?”

“Don’t you know, Mrs. Solo? When two lay together, their souls become one: you were married to him in life and one with him, in name and in the eyes of the law, and in death you were taken apart again. A widow is not a wife, after all. So when he returned to you, and you took him back into your bed— well, in a manner of speaking— you became one again, and now he has back the bit of soul he lost to me.”

Rey could not breathe. “But he ain’t moving. He doesn’t—” 

“Of course not. I said a bit of soul, not all the soul. His life, his half-life and his true life, is mine, young lady. Take the soul, leave the body. That was the terms of the agreement.”

“You’re tellin’ me he’s dead,” she said flatly, staring at the supine form on the floor of the woods.

The man in black lifted a shoulder. “Well, not quite yet. I did say his life is with me. I thought I’d come and be acquainted with the woman he was so desperate to not leave alone in the world.”

“What do you mean, it’s with you?” she demanded, and in answer, the man in black extended his hand, opening the black-gloved fingers to reveal a gleaming, flickering spark of golden light, like a firefly. She could not tear her eyes away from that fragile, small thing. “Give it back to him,” she whispered through numb lips. “Give it  _ back. _ ”

“I cannot do that, Mrs. Solo. You returned to him half his soul. His life, however, is mine by rights.”

“His life is  _ his, _ so it’s mine, too, since you said we were one person!” she protested, hands trembling. Wild dream or no, she would fight this man to the death for that spark of glowing life. “And I was not consulted on the matter.”

“The deal was made when he was dead. You were not a part of it.” The voice was dry and faintly amused, and she loathed it: how dare this man, be he spirit or devil, speak to her so?

“I was part of it, for if it was not for me then he wouldn't have made it. Give his life back! For it is mine too, now, since we're one again. Give it _back_ to him!”

The man in black sighed, as if she was a petulant child in a schoolroom. “Mrs. Solo—”

Rey crossed the glen and seized the man by the right ear. He yelped in shock as she boxed his other one, the beaver hat flying off his head. “I said _give it back!”_ she screamed as loudly as she could, and in a flash she had torn the old red ribbon from her braid and wrapped it tight around her hand. “Or I shall never let you go, never ever, and you will walk with me from now to Judgment Day, you old devil!”

“Let me go!” he thundered, his eyes suddenly gleaming a bright, awful red. “Let me go, woman!”

“No!” she shouted right back, for she had never been afraid of a fight in her life, not since she had been a tiny, scrapping orphan without any shoes on her feet or a name of her own. “No, I won’t, I won’t: not until you give him back to me!”

He howled and shrieked and tried to frighten her, and the ribbon that wound her to him began to smart and ache like fire, but she didn’t let go and he could not escape, held fast to her with the red ribbon. Then he tried bribery, flattery, begging, promises: none of that worked either, and at last he relented, opening his hand to her. Rey reached out, cupping the hot, glowing spark in her dirty right palm, and dragged the man in black to Ben’s side, where he lay, dead and unmoving. “Put it in his heart,” he instructed, wincing as she yanked his ear down. “Over his breast: the life knows where to go.”

Rey did as he instructed, letting it fall over his chest. It sank into his body, vanishing like a raindrop into a puddle, and she watched with tears in her eyes as the open eyes flickered, the fingers twitched, the lips parted. “Has he got a heartbeat?” she demanded. “Is he truly living now?”

“See for yourself,” said the man in black, and Rey reached out with her free hand, careful to not let the man go, to feel for Ben’s heartbeat.  _ Thud-thud, thud-thud _ , it said, glad and even and strong in his chest, and she began to weep. “Oh, let me go, let me go,” whined the man, struggling with her. “I cannot abide crying and weeping.”

Ben stirred, lips moving, and Rey held fast to the devil by the ear: suppose it was another trick? But Ben’s cheeks were ruddy, flushed, and as she watched the awful burns all faded away, the red scars departing and leaving behind only fresh pale skin, marred only by the old scar from the pickaxe… yet as she watched, that faded too, until he looked just as he had the day she had married him. His eyes opened, confused, and he found her face, sitting up and paying no mind to the man in black. “Rey,” he said, voice rough and sleepy.

“Ben?” she breathed, hardly daring to speak. “Is it truly you? How d’you feel?”

He stretched his arms and frowned. “Powerful hungry, and I’ve got to answer th’ call of nature something awful. Why are we in the middle of the woods, catfish mouth? And where’s our clothes?”

She burst into tears and shoved the devil away, letting him go and paying no mind to the burning in her left hand. “Get you gone,” she told him over her shoulder as he picked himself up, “and if you ever come near us again, I’ll string you up myself.”

“Much obliged, ma’am,” he said with as much dignity as he could— and collected his hat— and with a nod and a turn, he was gone, and had left them alone in the hollow. Ben watched him go with slightly confused eyes, as if he could not really see the man. 

“Was someone there just now?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Nobody you need to be concerned about,” Rey said, and flung herself down into his lap, sobbing as she embraced him. “Oh, Ben.  _ Ben, _ you’ve come back to me.”

“I’ll always come back to you,” he whispered, clinging to her close. “I feel like I’ve been dreaming. Did we… no, I must have dreamed it, I had a penny...”

“You didn't dream it and neither did I. We, well, we've gone and coupled in the woods, and— oh, Lord, the fire’s gone out, and you must be frozen cold.” Rey pulled her head back and cupped his warm, pink, living cheeks, and kissed him everywhere she could reach while he held her close, bewildered, but happy. “Oh, and this—” and she slipped his wedding ring back on his finger, clinging to his hand. “There. Now you are whole again.”

“Hallo!” shouted a voice, far off, and Rey looked up in consternation, forgetting too late that her clothes were hanging on the trees and not on her body as they should be in polite company. “Hallo! Mrs. Solo? Where are you?”

“Who’s looking for my wife?” shouted Ben, scrambling up to his feet and getting dressed as quick as he could. 

The calls went quiet, and the next thing Rey knew, Dr. Dameron and Phineas had burst through the underbrush, carrying blankets and wearing stunned expressions as they came upon the scene: Rey with her chemise flapping open and in her knickers, furiously blushing as she hid herself from view, and Ben Solo, on his feet, half-dressed in a dirty union suit and trousers, and very much alive as he blocked them with his broad arms and chest from getting any closer. 

“Mr. Solo?” said Dameron, astonished.

“Well, who else would I be?” demanded Ben. “Not a step closer: my wife needs to dress.”

Rey snatched her clothes off the branches, furiously flushing. “They’re still wet, Ben.”

“Here’s a blanket,” said Phineas, and handed it to Ben. “She can wear it: it’ll be a fair sight warmer, sir.”

“Much obliged, Mr…” Ben waited, unsure.

“Phineas, sir. My friends call me Finn, though Miss Rey stands on propriety and calls me Mr. Finn, and I do not mind it.” He smiled, and Rey returned it, shy, as Ben draped the blanket about her. 

“What have you done to your hand?” asked Dameron, bewildered, and Rey looked down: she had hardly felt the pain, but the skin of her left hand was scarlet and raised where the ribbon had been, as if it had been burned. “Let me see it: I can dress it when we get back to the surgery. And how— how in the world…” He gave up and waved his arms ineffectually at Ben. 

“I'll explain once we are safely back,” said Rey, huddling close to her husband, who carried her wet clothes under his arm, and they all walked back through the woods together. "But I fear you won't believe a word of it again, Mr. Dameron."

* * *

It seemed that most folk were willing to accept the explanation that Ben Solo had not, in fact, been dead at all, but mistaken for dead: after all, doctors did not know everything, did they? Dameron bandaged Rey’s hand, and as the days passed, the redness and swelling faded, but she would likely bear a scar about her palm for the rest of her life. Mother Solo was overjoyed to have Ben back home, and wept often and loudly, embracing her son, but the foreman was superstitious, and did not want to re-hire Ben to the team: it was bad luck, he claimed, and would bring down morale.

Rey could not have given a fig about the foreman. Ben was morose at not finding work, had an itch to go wandering, and felt that he was not doing his duties properly as a husband to provide for her, yet she had never loved him more, and spent every spare moment she had in his lap, or kissing him, or petting his hair. “You are my husband through ill and well,” she reminded him, “and nothing shall part you from me again.”

For memory came creeping back, like ice in cold bits and pieces of dreams as winter drew on to spring again: he knew he had been dead, and the memory of wanting life haunted his steps. When he woke from an awful dream, Rey was there to hold him close, and when Rey woke crying out to get the devil away, Ben was there to cradle her in his arms. 

Spring came on with soft green leaves and warm winds, and Rey walked into the post-office one morning to send a letter for Mother Solo. “Ah,” said the postman, “you have a parcel.”

“Me?” she asked, bewildered. “You must be mistaken. I do not know anyone who would send me a parcel.”

“No, no: it has your name on it, ma’am. Mrs. Benjamin Solo. Here.” He gave it to her, and she had to bolster up her strength and drag it to Mother Solo’s house step by step: it was very heavy.

Inside, when she had opened it, she found a box nailed shut, and when she had got the box open, she found the last thing she could have ever expected: rows on rows of gold bullion, gleaming and new, with a note inside writ in fine black ink that said only this:

_ Consider this a second-wedding present. _

_ Regards. _

“What in the world?” exclaimed Mother Solo, shocked. “Gold? More gold than a miner could dream to see! More gold than I have ever seen in my life!”

“It don’t seem right to take it,” said Ben, staring down at the yellow shine.

“It’s a gift, and I certainly shan’t look it in the mouth.” Rey put the lid back on, feeling as though she knew exactly who had sent her the gold. “Well, Mother, I think I have a hankering to leave Walker’s Hollow and see the world. Shall you come along?”

“Someone needs to teach the children, and I am too old for traveling,” answered Mother Leia. “You two go on. Make a new life. I hear lately there are workers to come to the mountains and help teach, which I shall be mightily grateful for.”

“Then we will,” said Ben, and kissed his mother on the cheek. “Come along home, Rey. We ought to hide this somewhere, and I know just the place.”

* * *

The place was under their kitchen table, and they soon forgot it was even there as they romped in bed with much delighted crying-out and sweating and moaning. Ben pulled his wife into his naked lap and sat her firmly down where he liked her to be most, and Rey squealed, kissing his face over and over as he bounced her there. 

“You’re too loud, catfish mouth,” he panted, sweat sticking his hair to his face. “They’re gonna hear you all the way up to the creek. Quit your caterwauling.”

“You like it,” she insisted, laughing as he rolled her over and crouched, kneeling, between her thighs. Rey hoisted her knees up and crossed her ankles at the small of his back. “Or you wouldn’t do such things to make me holler.”

“I do,” he confessed, and kissed her on the cheeks, the nose, her forehead, her chin, and finally her mouth. “Oh, I do.” Ben bent lower, kissing her breasts, and she squeaked aloud, kicking him with her heels. “Lord, but you’re pretty,” he whispered, and redoubled the efforts of his body until she yelped in release and sighed and went limp, and after that he followed her over the edge, spread out on her breast with his eyes shut as he moaned. 

“Where d’you want to go first?” she whispered.

“Mm. I dunno. You?”

“New York,” she said immediately. “Dameron says he thinks I might be a good doctor, and anyway I want to try my hand at a thousand different things. You might go to college, if you like, with the money: you are smart as a whip, and might be a proper educated man.”

“We’ll have to watch our speech and speak proper,” he said, raising his head and looking up at her. “Properly, I mean. Imagine me with a pocket-watch and a hat, and a walking-stick.”

“And me with silk roses on my hat and a real parlor,” she said, stroking his hair. “I think we ought to do just fine.”

“With you by my side, how could we not?” he said quietly. “And I’ll be by yours, too.”

“Together,” she agreed happily, and they fell asleep to the sound of the birds singing.


End file.
